


Five times David didn't understand what was going on with his girlfriend's nephew

by Bumblie_Bee



Series: How to gain a super-powered step-nephew and live to tell the tale [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, David also needs a hug for putting up with his nonsense, David likes Peter, F/M, Family Feels, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, POV Original Character, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Whump, defenestration of cannon, we wont tolerate no abuse in this fic thank you very much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28502973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bumblie_Bee/pseuds/Bumblie_Bee
Summary: and the one explanation that meant it all made sense.In which May somewhat successfully straddles two worlds, Peter tries (and fails) to be subtle, and David learns that having a super-powered step-nephew isn't quite as impossible as he'd have thought.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, May Parker (Spider-Man)/Other(s), Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Original Male Character(s), Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: How to gain a super-powered step-nephew and live to tell the tale [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2149830
Comments: 260
Kudos: 481
Collections: Identity Reveal x Field Trip, mcu stories that slap





	1. Peter could eat a horse (or three)

**Author's Note:**

> So, this fic was inspired something I read a while back. I can't remember who wrote it or what happen in the plot, but the concept of May's new partner actually being nice to Peter but very confused by him came from there. I'll give the fic a shout out when I locate it because it was very good! If anyone knows or just wants to find me on tumblr, I'm [bumblie-bee](https://bumblie-bee.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Also, just so you know, this is set in a world where Peter and his friends were snapped, May wasn't, and Tony and everyone else survived Endgame.

Peter’s an unusual kid, David’s figured out that much before he’s even met him.

He’s extraordinarily bright for a start; attends Midtown Tech on a scholarship, interns at Stark Industries, was part of the decathlon team that won nationals last year. He’s unusually kind too, according to May, selfless and thoughtful in a way most people can only aspire to, and more enthusiastic about anything and everything than any human, let alone a teenager, has the right to be. He’s a bit of a nerd too, as far as David can tell, enjoys repairing tech scavenged from dumpsters, knows more about physics than most graduates, spent an entire weekend last month building a Lego Millennium Falcon with his buddy.

So Peter’s odd, he’s already gathered that by the time he and May get to their three week anniversary, but it isn’t until he actually gets to know Peter that he realises there’s something more unusual about the kid than he previously thought. 

The first David meets Peter, he’s spent the past half an hour eating slightly cold noodles at the Parker’s dining table, listening to May apologising repeatedly for her absent nephew and their resultingly delayed meal as she stabs at her chicken with more force than necessary, and absentmindedly wondering how they’re going to fit the insane amount of leftovers into the small undercounter fridge in the Parker’s apartment.

The door opens then slams just as May is playing a game of Tetris with the remaining takeout cartons and her fridge, and then barely a second later, a dark haired teenager darts into the kitchen, discarding his backpack on the floor with an impressive thump on his way. Peter, he’s got to be Peter, is shorter than David expected from the photos he’s seen, only a little taller than May herself, but he does indeed have the pale skin and slim build of a kid who prefers video games to football.

“May, I’m so sorry,” Peter blurts breathlessly just as May asks him where he’s been with a frown. She’s looking him up and down as she speaks, and David wonders if she’s taking in the rumpled jumper and misbuttoned shirt and tousled curls just as he is. The kid looks like he’s had his clothes thrown at him and been told to dress in the three seconds he has prior to being dragged through a hedge backwards.

Maybe he has, David reasons, had to dress quickly after a sports lesson overran or something, not been dragged through a hedge backwards. The kid must do some sport at school after all.

That isn’t the explanation Peter gives as he accepts a couple of the takeout containers back from May, but he does apologise for losing track of time and being late for something he knows is so important to his aunt. He fetches a fork from the cutlery drawer as he speaks, and then shovels a frankly impressive quantity of cold rice into his mouth as soon as he’s done talking.

May sigh, half fond, half frustrated, and then takes the takeout containers back from her nephew and points him in the direction of the table. She reheats the food while Peter introduces himself, almost cautiously at first as though testing the water but warming quickly until he’s talking a mile a minute answering questions about school and hobbies and what he wants to do when he graduates with bright eyed enthusiasm.

There’s something good about him David decides as he enthusiastically explains the science behind the nanotech he’s working on in his internship with enough passion to leave him stuttering excitedly over his words, something more than what can be explained by his politeness and unabating eagerness and youthful innocence.

He’s still taking when the microwave dings, and the conversation doesn’t let up when he gets back up to help his aunt return the steaming takeout containers to the table. May’s smiling fondly when they both settle back down for a second round of dinner, although between his talking around the mouthfuls of chicken and noodles and rice he’s inhaling with gusto and listening with wide eyed interest to David’s tales from the PICU, Peter doesn’t seem to have noticed.

With the conversation flowing, David doesn’t notice something either. It isn’t until they’re clearing up that he realises not a single one of the seven takeout containers May had handed back to Peter has anything left for the fridge.

Peter eats a lot; David learns so during his increasingly regular visits to the Parker residence over the next month. He’s like a bottomless pit, always starving for dinner, for lunch, for snacks in between meals, during movie nights with May and Lego building sessions with his buddy. David’s sure he would be eating during his study sessions with Ned and his scarily intense girlfriend if she hadn’t bapped him round the head with a notebook when he tried last week. Apparently Cheeto dust and textbooks aren’t a good mix.

He eats more than really makes sense considering his height and build, but for the most part, David thinks nothing of it. He’s a growing boy, a teenager, they eat a lot, he knows so from work. And Peter’s clearly still got some growing to do. 

Peter’s eating habits don’t really cross his mind in any great magnitude until one Friday evening six weeks later. It starts of as a fairly standard evening, with May and David watching a documentary on the Amazon while they wait for their dinner to be delivered and silently bet on whether it’ll be Peter or the pizza that turns up first.

Unusually, it’s Peter, who stumbles in, deposits his backpack in his bedroom, and then flops down in the armchair he typically favours.

“Is the pizza not here yet?” he asks in greeting, frowning a little as he tucks his feet up under himself and curls into his sweater.

“Nice to see you too, honey.” May rolls her eyes as she flashes him a smile, but when David checks his watch, he realises that it’s indeed the pizza that’s late. He guesses that does make more sense; even though he hasn’t known the kid all that long, he’s already well aware that Peter’s time keeping skills leave a lot to be desired.

Peter sighs at his aunt and rolls his own eyes but, unusually, says nothing in reply. No witty remark, no return greeting, no launching into an explanation of why he’s late like normal. Just a huff of air and then the quiet creak of tired wood as he makes himself more comfortable in the chair.

It’s odd enough that David takes his eyes off the screen to properly look at him, and it’s then that he realises the kid doesn’t look quite as buoyant as he usually does. He’s more slumped than sitting, his knee still rather than bouncing with endless pent up energy, and his eyes look dull and heavy lidded on his slightly too pale face as he frowns at the screen.

May must have noticed too, because before David can even think of a way to ask the kid if he’s okay without sounding too much like a helicopter parent for so early on in their relationship, she’s sat up a little more to look at him properly too.

“Peter, you alright?”

Peter glances back over from the tv, expression momentarily tired and frowning a little before his chocolate eyes open fully and he smiles brightly in a way that _almost_ makes David question what’s causing his concern. “Yeah, for sure. Are you?”

“Peter…”

Peter sighs and rolls his eyes like May is making a meal out nothing. “May, really, I’m okay. Just… just a little tired is all. Okay, and _hungry_ ,” he adds at his aunt’s doubtfully raised brow, flushing a little when his stomach chooses that moment to growl pointedly. The rumble is loudly enough that, for a second, David thinks it’s the upstairs neighbours moving their sideboard across the floor again.

A moment passes, and then he huffs a laugh to break the silence.

“You’re always hungry, Pete,” he says even though he isn’t quite sure he believes the kid. He does look tired, but he’s also pasty enough that David worries he might be coming down with something. May doesn’t seem to believe him fully either; the look she gives him is heavier in concern than before.

“Dinner won’t be long, I’ll chase it if it isn’t here soon,” she reassures him, and Peter nods and smiles a tired smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes in return. He mutters something about being a growing boy as he curls back up and rests his head against the arm of the chair, and it takes David a good few seconds to work out the delayed answer is meant for him.

The evening takes another detour from normality half an hour later, when the tv pops off just at the climax of a particularly dramatic cheetah hunt sequence with a bang that draws a yelp from May and what could only be described as a full on flinch from Peter. David only catches it out of the corner of his eye, much too preoccupied with the lukewarm coffee he’s splashed on his thigh, and wonders if the kid had been almost asleep before the bang. 

“Oh seriously?” May groans, flipping on the side lamp and untangling herself from David’s legs. He lets her get up and then follows her across the room, rolling his eyes and starting to pull out the TV cabinet when May just frowns at it, hands on hips.

“Maybe it blew a fuse?” Peter suggests, looking interested as he watches over the top of his phone but making no move to get up from his chair and help. “Or a capacitor.”

“Well, fuses I can do, capacitors, not even sure what they are,” David mutters in response, frowning at the back of the slightly acrid scented but unblemished TV and hoping for inspiration. Or maybe for a helpful flashing light to tell him exactly what is wrong and how to fix it. Or maybe just a miracle. He’s clever, sure, works as a paediatric intensive care nurse after all, but fixing fried appliances isn’t really his forte.

Peter on the other hand… well, he’s good enough at this sort of thing that his absentminded suggestion of a blown fuse is probably right.

It’s definitely more of a lead than David’s going to come up with anyway.

May seems to agree too because she hums and turns and heads from the room, muttering about screwdrivers and asking herself if she put the spare fuses in with the tools or not. It’s in the midst of that that the doorbell rings, and with May searching for fuses and David moving the TV cabinet out further, it’s Peter who gets up to answer it.

And it’s then that the evening really goes wrong, because after Peter stands, after he makes it just a few steps towards the door, he stops, and his eyes widen, and all the remaining colour drains rapidly from his face.

David’s seen enough people faint to know what’s about to happen before it does.

The broken TV is instantly forgotten and he’s already back on his feet and darting across the living room before Peter’s eyes roll back into his skull and he crumples bonelessly. It’s only due to that he manages to catch the kid’s head before it hits the coffee table.

“May!”

He kneels there for a second, a tangle of limp, gangly teenager in his arms before he realises Peter isn’t going to wake as quickly as he’d hoped, and by the time May has skittered back into the lounge, he’s got the kid’s surprisingly light form off the floor and half way back across the room.

Instantly, May is helping him to arrange her nephew on the sofa.

“Is he hurt?”

“I don’t think so,” David answered distractedly, freeing Peter’s arm from where it’s become trapped under his body while May elevates his rocket-socked feet up on the arm of the sofa. When he takes hold of the kid’s limp wrist, he finds the skin cold and clammy, and a moment later he catches the first beat of the pulse racing under his fingertips.

Despite the speed, the rhythm is strong and steady enough that he doubts Peter is in any real danger, but before he can get a proper number for Peter’s heart rate, the wrist he’s holding pulls feebly against his grasp and a groan, one soft and low, escapes Peter’s pale lips. His eyelids flutter weakly, his head rolling a little on the cushion as he comes around, and then all of a sudden, he starts awake.

The wrist is pulled from David’s grip with surprising strength as Peter launches himself away with more force than coordination. The previously half lidded eyes are wide and terrified as he struggles away in panic, and David’s pretty sure it’s only May’s hand coming to cup his cheek that stops him leaping off the sofa in his confusion.

“Peter, it’s okay. You’re safe. You’re at home on the sofa, you passed out in the living room. Do you remember?”

It takes an endlessly long second for Peter to register her words, and even longer for him to understand them, but then his posture relaxes and his eyes close in relief, and with his chest still heaving with dissipating adrenaline, he shakily slumps back into the sofa. May moves with him, her hand still cupping his cheek as she helps him lay his head back on a pillow and then holding him as his breathing slows.

“m sorry, May,” he murmurs breathlessly against her hand, his eyes still closed and his voice so weak and slurred David nearly misses the words. “Didn’t… didn’t think that would happen.”

“It’s okay, just take your time to wake, okay? You’re fine.” May’s thumb rubs tenderly over his cheek as she softly soothes him, and Peter nods against her hand, his heavy, bleary eyes unfocused and fighting a losing battle to stay open. They fall closed for a couple of seconds before he wakes enough to remember they’re not alone.

May lets him sit when he tries again, helps him get upright when his arms shake too much to hold his weight and leans his head against her shoulder to stop him falling again when his eyes take on that faraway look again. He licks his lips while he waits for his headrush to settle, frowning a little as he presses them together, and it’s then that David realises exactly what has happened.

“Can you get him a cola from the fridge?” May asks him quietly, her gaze flashing up from her nephew for the briefest of seconds. They’re worried, her eyes, pinched in concern, but the set of her mouth and the curve of her brows looks more frustrated than anything.

That coupled with that the fact she seems to have worked out what was going on long before he did, has David suddenly wondering if this isn’t the first time this has happened.

If maybe, despite Peter’s usually ravenous appetite, there have been other days when he’s eaten little enough that his blood sugar tanked and he collapsed to the carpet like a puppet with its strings cut. 

Peter’s a little more awake when he returns with the soda. He’s still pale and clammy, slumped bonelessly against the sofa cushions, but he looks up at the sound of footsteps and reaches out to take the can with a shaky hand when it’s offered to him. Judging by the lack of eye contact he makes as he accepts the drink, David thinks he would be flushed with embarrassment if he had any colour left at all.

It's understandable, his embarrassment. It isn’t like anyone wants to be seen at their most vulnerable by someone who’s only just been upgraded from stranger, let alone a teenage boy still trying desperately to make out he’s an adult.

“I’ll go get the pizza,” he offers quietly after giving Peter a comforting smile and one last quick look over, and May flashes him a grateful smile before returning to her task of supporting the weight of the can Peter’s doing a so-so job of holding to his lips. A little has spilt on his shirt already, his hands too shaky to hold it still.

David takes his time fetching then plating up the pizza, keeping one ear open for more commotion from the living room while giving May and Peter a little privacy. He doesn’t listen into their conversation, he hasn’t the right to, but he overhears enough to know that a busy day, a skipped lunch and the delay of dinner are the likely cause of Peter’s swan dive.

Except, his medical training tells him it shouldn’t be. Not to that extent anyway. Most healthy kids should be able to go from breakfast to dinner without doing an Oscar winning impression of a Victorian lady in their living room. Maybe it was just a bad day, he reasons as he walks back through with the plates and boxes warming his hands, or maybe Peter just isn’t an entirely healthy kid after all.

Hours later, the evening has returned to some semblance of normal. The TV, fuse replaced, is playing an old episode of The Great British Bake Off, May’s contently asleep on his shoulder, a red mark on her nose from the glasses he’s finally been able to remove without her waking enough to stop him with a mumble that’s she’s watching the telly, and Peter’s laying stretched out on his back on the carpet, texting with his phone held over his face while he digests the frankly impossible amount of pizza he’s consumed.

He’s awake properly now, bubbly and energetic again, his complexion back to normal and his eyes bright and his knee restless as ever, and it very clearly was just a lack of food that had brought him to the floor hours before.

Despite that, David finds himself still worrying for the kid rather than focusing on the impressive yet precarious biscuit stacks the bakers are making. The swan dive, however easily solved it ended up being, concerns him simply because it shouldn’t have happened.

Peter’s healthy according to May, he’d quietly asked her if there was something up while Peter had been changing into his pyjamas, if maybe his blood pressure or iron levels were low, but she’d huffed a laugh he didn’t quite understand and said he was fine, just an idiot for prioritising homework and decathlon practice over lunch.

David doesn’t want to disagree, but he thinks he might.

Peter eats a lot, he’s known since that first meal, but he’s only realising now how much of a lot it really is. It’s a huge amount more than makes sense for his size and exercise schedule, and despite all he eats, he doesn’t seem to be gaining any weight. He doesn’t seem to weigh all that much either, after having him in his arms David knows he’s light, and apparently, he can’t skip a meal without his blood sugar tanking enough that he passes out.

He hasn’t noticed any other signs that something’s wrong, that his circulatory system isn’t functioning properly or his pancreas is starting to give up the ghost, hasn’t noticed Peter drinking excessive amounts of water or peeing more than standard (he’s a nurse, not creepy), but he’s starting to think somethings not quite normal. 

He’s starting to think something is up with Peter’s metabolism, but what, he hasn’t quite figure that out. 


	2. A sensitive kid in more ways than one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooh so thanks for all the comments and kudos on the first chapter of this, I'm really glad so many of you like David! 
> 
> Also, it turns out the fic I was looking for was [The Secrets We Keep](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19377760) by [OnceAponaFangirl ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnceUponaFangirl/pseuds/OnceUponaFangirl) and I would definitely recommend reading it, it's very good!
> 
> Oh, and just to let anyone who wants to know know, there's a very, very vague discussion about an event that occurred in bed between two consenting adults in the second block of text. 
> 
> Thanks for reading :)

Peter’s a sensitive kid; that’s the second odd thing David learns about him. Not that being sensitive is a bad thing, not in the normal meaning anyway. Peter’s heart of gold is worn on his sleeve, and David thinks nothing less of him for it. Toxic masculinity is never a good thing to install in a boy.

He’s kind of pleased Peter is such an open book to read though, because after all he’s been through with his uncle passing away and then being blipped, David really doesn’t want to cause him any more upset by barrelling into his life. He loves May, more than he thought he could ever love anyone again, but she has Peter, and he should be her number one priority.

Despite his worries, May’s insisted it’s fine. She says she’s spoken to Peter, says he’s told her he understands she’s had time to mourn and move on during the years he wasn’t there, that he knows his uncle Ben would want her to be happy, but they both know to Peter his Uncle’s barely been gone two years. 

Time’s more complicated now than David ever thought it could be.

They still take it slowly though, make sure Peter’s fine with it regularly. He always says he is, always smiles, and David’s pleased he’s such an open book because he’d be worried Peter was lying about it for May’s benefit if he wasn’t so completely and utterly awful at it. 

He finds out Peter’s sensitive in another sense of the word when May crawls back into bed one Saturday morning and flumps face down onto her pillow with a groan.

“We are never doing that again. Not while Peter’s here.”

David’s still half asleep when he rolls over, drapes and arm over her shoulders and slurs, “Hmm, doin’ what?”

May gives him a shove away. “What we did, you know, last night!” she hisses.

It takes David’s dozy brain a good few seconds to calibrate and work out exactly what she means.

“Peter heard?” he asks with a frown rolling onto his side. May’s face is pressed into the pillow, but the groan he gets in response gives him the answer to his question. They really hadn’t intended for what had happened the night before to happened, never did when Peter was around, but there had been a date night while Peter was out, and the date night involved good food and wine and music, and then Peter had returned (late, but May never seemed too fussed as long as he was home by midnight) and then after more wine and Peter’s retreat to his room, well, they’d retreated to May’s room. And they’d tried to be quiet, subtle, and he thought they had been but…

“He cornered me in the kitchen,” May moans, and he knows her face is beet red against her pillow. He’d imagine Peter’s was too when he’d brought the subject up. Peter, who, apparently, has some sort of super hearing.

David pulls her into a hug and laughs softly into her shoulder. Not that them traumatising her kid was funny, per se, the kid’s been through a lot, more than most adults would be able to cope with, but well, the image of Peter and May talking about _that_ in the kitchen, both bleary eyed and flushed kind of is.

“Who was more embarrassed?” he asks through his chuckles.

May shakes her head and groans, “Ugh, I don’t even know.”

May says Peter’s sensitive in a third way too, although David knows that one’s a joke.

He’d first heard of Peter’s sixth sense one evening, when as they were having dinner, Peter had caught a glass David knocked off the table without even looking.

David had been impressed at the time, told the kid “nice catch!” and jokingly suggested he try out for the baseball team. Peter had flushed, muttered something unintelligible in return about asthma, and May had laughed and said it was just his Peter Tingle which just resulted in his cheeks burning an even deeper red.

“ _May_ ,” he’d groaned, and then muttered, “it’s not even called that,” under his breath as he stabbed at his fries with a little more force than necessary.

May laughing, had reached over to give him a hug, and then explained, to her nephew’s annoyance, about Peter’s supposed sixth sense.

David had known they were joking at the time, still knows it now. The kid’s just observant, notices things most people don’t, has good hearing and impressive reflexes. Sixth senses are things reserved for movies.

David’s pulled from his thoughts by a frustrated grunt echoing down from Peter’s room followed by the sound of something slamming against wood. Or maybe against a wall, he isn’t sure which, but it doesn’t really matter what exactly has taken the brunt.

What matters more is that the kid’s upset about something, and David isn’t really surprised. 

“Peter, you okay?”

There’s no immediate response to his call, no ‘I’m cool’ in reply, just a wet sounding groan, and that’s when he pauses the DVD and pushes himself up from the couch to investigate.

He doesn’t think Peter’s hurt, not physically anyway, but the kid’s been looking downright exhausted and at wit’s end all week, and with May at work, he reasons it’s up to him to reassure her resident teenager before a breakdown ensures.

Not that Peter’s prone to breakdowns, he’s a good kid, but there’s a stress limit for everyone and with the combined pressure of both midterms and the suddenly increased intensity of his internship, he think’s Peter’s just about reaching his.

That he hasn’t been sleeping well recently probably isn’t helping either.

He hasn’t said anything about it, not when David has been around anyway, but the dark circles bruising the skin under his eyes and the quiet sound of footsteps padding about in the small hours of the morning are easy to extrapolate from.

As he expected, he finds Peter slumped at his desk when he peeks around the already open door, his expression beaten and his posture so hunched a chiropractor might be in order. Homework and notes and pens and textbooks are scattered over the scratched wooden surface, sheets of loose paper spilling over his laptop keyboard and cascading past the edge of his desk and onto the floor.

David doesn’t know what looks more of a mess, the workspace or the boy sitting before it.

The realisation that Peter’s hand is sticky enough with whatever it is he’s smuggled from the kitchen on his last supply run that he’s currently got a piece of what looks to be his math homework resolutely glued to his fingertips despite his increasingly frantic efforts to shake it off kind of tips the balance.

“Peter?”

Peter flinches up from his frustrated flapping. For just a second, the raw exhaustion and upset in his widened eyes is obvious. Even after he gathers himself and schools it away, there is little he can do to hide the redness rimming them or unnatural shine on their surface. Self-consciously, he ducks his head and rubs them dry with the sleeve of his hoodie.

“You could have knocked,” he protests half-heartedly, voice a little thicker than normal and head still bowed. A second passes, and then he frowns and sighs and gives his hand a feeble, more defeated shake. The paper finally comes free. They both watch it drift towards the floor.

“I was just going to ask if you were okay, but well… I think the math might be winning,” David says when the paper has settled on the carpet, resting on top of a used sock Peter’s discarded beside his closet. There’s a textbook down there too, its pages bent and its spine splayed and David wonders if that casualty of Peter’s overladen desk may have been the source of the bang that had drawn him to the room.

Peter coughs a brief, bitter sound that could be either a laugh or a sob. “Hmm, death by algebra sounds nice about now. At least I wouldn’t have to finish it.”

“Might give your aunt a bit of a shock when she comes home though,” David says, frowning. He isn’t quite sure where he and Peter stand just yet, how far along the line between stranger and parental figure he lies, how far he’ll ever get, but he cares a lot about the kid already, and it hurts to see him so exhausted and stressed he’s close to crying over algebra.

Blatant concern and worry don’t often work well with Peter, he’s learnt that much over the months they’ve known each other, but the light-hearted, slightly humorous approach usually does. It does this time, too, kind of, and he gets a short, wet noise that sounds more laugh than cry in response.

Progress.

The kid has a wobbly smirk playing on his lips too, and it holds as he says, “It’d definitely be an unexpected way for me to go.”

“Oh entirely.” David nods, smiles back a little sadly, watches as the kid has another attempt at wiping away his tears. “But before that happens, any way I can help? Just to save your Aunt the hassle of having to arrest all those numbers for your murder, there’s a lot of them, you know.”

The kid huffs. “It’s algebra,” he quips back feebly enough that David isn’t entirely sure he’s joking, “It’s mostly letters.”

“Well, I’m sure she’d get those too,” David confirms with faux sincerity. “Even the Greek ones.”

“Even the Greek ones?”

“Oh, definitely. She’d make sure to avenge you properly, no half-hearted alphabet slaughtering in this apartment, thank you very much.”

Peter snorts at that and flicks at his paper. He waits a second, and then sighs.

“Thanks for the offer, but I’m okay. It’s just homework. And I’m just… tired, I guess.”

David nods knowingly. “And stressed.”

There’s a pause, Peter sitting stiff in his seat, and then, “Yeah, maybe,” he eventually relents, posture deflating a little further. David waits patiently for the fallout he knows is coming.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

“It’s just, a lot, sometimes. Like, school and homework and decathlon and the internship and… and everything. And normally it’s okay, I can cope but. I don’t know. Not today, apparently.” He huffs, knocks a pen away in frustration.

David nods sympathetically, resists the urge to gather the downtrodden, exhausted kid into a hug because he’s not sure he’d appreciate it.

“We should get milkshakes,” he says instead. 

“Huh?” Peter finally looks up. His dark, heavy set eyes are confused under furrowed brows as though maybe he thinks he heard that wrong. David winces a little at the sight of them, so tired they’re almost sunken and set in a face that’s two shades paler than normal. The tired darkness around the left one is unhelpfully accentuated by bruising and the eye itself is a little bloodshot.

Peter had explained it as the result of a mistimed catch in his sports lesson the previous afternoon, but David’s heard enough kids lie about the origin of their injuries to know Peter’s story had just a little too much detail to ring true. He isn’t quite sure how a football could cause the grazing along his jawline either.

“Milkshakes,” he repeats instead of arguing with Peter about that, “from that gelato place you like. The one near the park.”

Peter blinks, processing, and then shakes his head. “I have homework. Algebra, remember.” The sheet of algebra gets kicked a little way across the floor as though to prove a point.

David shakes his head. “You need a break, Peter. Just for an hour or so,” he adds when Peter opens his mouth to protest. “Get some fresh air, some food. Calm down a bit, relax, and then maybe you’ll be feeling better for it later. Have a different perspective on your work.”

It takes a while, but eventually, Peter nods tiredly. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Great.” David smiles in relief as Peter pushes himself up from his desk. His movements are stiff and heavy with exhaustion, and he grimaces before bending down and scooping the loose sheets of homework from the carpet. The algebra gets picked up last, and Peter screws it into a ball then throws it into the trashcan with a sigh. At least it doesn’t get stuck to him this time. David doesn’t think either of them would be able to cope with that happening again.

He finds himself grinning a little at the memory and turns away to hide it.

“Oh, Peter, wash your hands before we go,” he says as he leaves to fetch his jacket. “You’re not getting in my car like that, you sticky monster.”

Milkshakes in the park turns out to be a brilliant idea despite the frigid weather. Peter still looks tired, weary, like he has the weight of the world on his young shoulders, but the further they walk, the calmer he seems and by the time they make it through the park to the gelato house, the teary wetness has gone from his eyes.

He’s still quiet as they wait, was all the time they were walking too. He doesn’t launch into an explanation of some science David has no hope of keeping up with or the latest theory he and Ned have about the next Star Wars Lego set, but he does answer David’s questions with no protest and listens with interest when he starts talking about the more fascinating cases he’s heard about at work.

He’s not sulking or upset any more, just tired.

The milkshake itself seems to help a bit too, the sugar and milk and chocolate bringing more of a bounce back into Peter’s step with every sip. The kid sure does need a lot of food.

“Are you going to tell me or your aunt the truth about that eye?” David asks casually as they’re starting to make their way back to the car.

Peter looks up from his milkshake, frowning a little despite the lightness of the question. The hand not carrying his drink twitches a little as though on course to probe the bruise before he thought better of it. “Was that why you brought me out here?”

David huffs a laugh. “No, not everything has a double meaning. You really did look like you needed a break. I just thought I’d ask while we’re here. You don’t have to tell me, but I’m here if you want to.”

Peter smiles at the ground, kicks a pebble along the sidewalk. “Thanks,” he says, sounding like he means it, “but there’s really nothing to tell.”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“So, you scraped your chin on a football? I see why you’re not on the team.”

Peter frowns, looking almost irritated, at himself for lying, at David for calling him out, maybe, but then suddenly his eyes widen, and the next thing David knows he’s landing hard on the ground, his ribs aching from the tackle and his elbow raw from its collision with the tarmac. His coat is ruined, he knows, and there’s something cold and sticky on his face.

Chocolate milkshake.

Peter’s milkshake.

And Peter is on the floor beside him.

“Peter, what the hell!” he scolds, sore and confused, before a van snatches his attention by careering over the curb and crashing into the low wall beside him. Bricks and mortar rubble scatter noisily, the metal of the van screeches in protest, and someone on the other side of the debris covered hood yells in alarm. 

It isn’t until a second has passed and the cement dust has settled that David realises the is ruined van exactly where they had been standing only moments before. 

It isn’t until he’s sat at home on the sofa an hour later, the end of Sixth Sense playing on the TV and a bag of ice on his sore elbow, that David realises that Peter, however observant, couldn’t have seen the van coming. That it had come from behind them. That he had been facing the wrong way.

He thinks about it for a moment, considers asking Peter how he knew, but the kid is working on his homework again, more productively this time, with no tears and fewer stressed groans, and he doesn’t feel his question is quite important enough to interrupt. The kid deserves his peace and quiet if he wants it; David’s pretty sure he saved his life today. Saved him a huge hospital bill, at least.

He knows there must have been something to tip him off, though. Something like the sound of the engine or a reflection in the window or some other perfectly reasonable explanation because anything else, anything like a sixth sense or the Peter Tingle May jokes exists, well, that would just be impossible.

Right?


	3. Peter Parker: Just a Stark intern?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, firstly I meant to get this up sooner but then stuff (lockdown 3.0, back to uni, my birthday, a tonne of virtual parties because apparently everyone I know is born in January) happened. 
> 
> Also be kind about this one, I'm not too happy with it, it is like 6,000 words though so... 
> 
> And be kind to Tony too, I love the guy, but this isn't from my point of view. Or Tony's more importantly. 
> 
> TW for vomiting (and too much testosterone in one room)

David doesn’t notice the third odd thing about Peter, exactly, he more has an epiphany about how weird it is one Friday while he’s cooking a surprise lasagne for May. It isn’t the dinner that sparks his moment of realisation, far from it, but it is as he’s standing at the stove stirring the bolognaise that he overhears the conversation of Peter, Ned, and Michelle drifting through from Peter’s room.

They’re not talking about much of interest, not that David is trying to listen. At first there are just occasional comments on homework, then a bunch of quickfire questions he thinks might be practice for Decathlon, before, finally, they wear themselves out and the conversation migrates to something more casual.

Which is good, it’s a Friday evening, their conversation should be casual.

After all their work, it’s the avengers the conversation migrates to, and to be exact, Peter’s encounter with them the previous weekend, because, apparently, the kid doesn’t just work in the labs and get babysat by his mentor while he’s away at the Compound upstate; he socialises.

With the Avengers.

With gods and enhanced individuals and ex-Russian-spies.

Which is just… insane, really.

Insane and slightly concerning in that it seems Peter is spending his Saturday evenings with people who could quite literally crush him with just their little finger.

It’s also a little insane that Peter has managed to get himself the internship in the first place, and that’s the realisation David has as he stirs the sauce.

He’s not knocking Peter, far from it. The kid’s clever, a genius disguised by too big, well washed sweaters and nerdy t-shirts and weird amounts of borrowed Lego, but it’s well known in the science world that Stark industries don’t usually take undergraduates as interns, let alone high schoolers. He’s pretty sure Tony Stark never mentors the interns himself either.

And yet, with Peter, for some reason he is. 

Tony Stark dedicates a surprising amount of time to him, too, judging by the number of weekends Peter spends at the Avenger’s Compound upstate or working in Stark’s private labs in his penthouse apartment. David knows he visits after school some days too, that he’s stayed for dinner more times than he can count, that he occasionally goes with his boss to conferences and events all around the world, but he doesn’t actually know how such an arrangement came to exist. It’s just never been discussed before, and suddenly, David is kind of curious.

More than a little curious really, but more because he, and most of the other science brained kids he’d been friends with at Peter’s age, would have killed for such a high profile internship than because he suspects anything untoward has occurred. Peter’s not one of those kids who’s driven beyond extreme, he has friends and a social life and spends time with May, but he is dedicated and focused and naturally brilliant enough that he deserves to get any internship he wants.

He’s a clever kid.

Beyond clever, really.

And more importantly, David thinks, he’s a good kid too. 

“How did you get your internship?” he asks curiously when Peter trots through to the kitchen a little later.

Peter pauses along his bee-line between the doorway and the fridge, looks over with his brows pointedly raised. Only when he’s made his point that David’s inadvertent spying has been noted does he shrug casually and continue across the room.

“I applied for it,” he explains as he rummages in the fridge for cans of cola, stacks them on the counter, and then moves on to the snack cupboard. “It’s through ugh- the… the September Foundation. That’s it. It’s Tony’s grant scheme for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds,” he tacks on at David’s head tilt. The words come out a little garbled by the mouthful of Cheetos he’s just inhaled, but David understands enough of what he’s said to know he doesn’t quite understand.

“Don’t you go to a fancy science school?”

The comment earns him an eyeroll. “Well, yeah, but on a scholarship. Besides-” Peter throws another Cheeto in, gathers his loot to leave, and then gives a care free sort of smile which David thinks is _supposed_ to make him look innocent- “I’m an orphan; that definitely wins me like a tonne of points on the disadvantaged scale.”

With another grin, Peter skedaddles, arms full of so much food David would yell a reminder of the lasagne about to go in the oven if he wasn’t still caught up on the kid’s overly cheerful, casual self-labelling.

As David spends more and more time in the Parker’s apartment, he begins to notice how little time Peter spends there and how much he spends working on his internship. Even though he appreciates the nights the kid away, has done more than ever since that morning when he’d learnt about Peter’s impressive hearing, he likes Peter, likes getting to know him and kind of misses him when he isn’t there.

He knows it’s a lot of work for the kid to be doing alongside school, too.

Tony works him hard. May says so with a weighty sort of smile when he asks, says he sometimes forgets how young he is too, and David can see so from the heavy tiredness that hangs about on the Sundays he’s round when Peter returns from the trips upstate he adores and May merely tolerates.

A few weeks after David moves in full time, the Avengers assemble. The news reveals little information to begin with about what’s going down, but a text from Peter to May suggests it’s something to do with a giant lizard.

“Has Stark left Pete upstate alone?” he asks as they sit on the sofa watching the news roll. A clip of Iron Man flying away from the compound gets replaced by one of the jet landing just outside a small town in rural Nebraska which is followed in turn by one an Avenger he can’t name shooting a series of glowing arrows from a rooftop at… yeah, Peter’s right; that is a giant lizard.

“May?”

“Hmm, what?”

“Peter. Does he need a lift back now Stark’s, um, occupied…” he trails off with a frown, motions towards the TV where a rough, cell phone filmed clip of Iron Man blasting through the desert sky is suddenly showing. Warm Machine is with him, and when he turns a small, red and blue figure is visible clinging to his silvery back. “We could go fetch him if he wants to come home.”

With her eyes still on the screen, May shakes her head. “Tony will bring him back when this is over,” she says with a grimace, watching intently as Spider-Man webs up the roaring green creature from his perch with impressive precision considering the speed at which they’re rapidly circling the chaos below. “He promised he’ll be fine until then.”

Peter is indeed fine when he returns the next day, a little tired maybe, but then again, he nearly always is.

It just so happens that Peter’s at the Compound the next time the Avenger’s are on the news too, and like the time before, May leaves him working there until Tony drops him back on Sunday evening. He looks knackered when he returns, absent mindedly says he’s had a good weekend when David asks, and only revises that to saying it was kind of boring without Tony to work in the lab with when prompted.

David doesn’t know what the kid spent the weekend doing, can’t get much of an answer out of the half asleep kid, but it seems even with his boss away he’s been busy enough to nearly fall asleep curled up on the sofa against May’s side that evening as they watch the news roll.

It’s only when a story on the clean-up operation of the day before’s fight comes on that he rallies a little, typical teenager, watching with interest as they discuss the event and the damage and the time scale and cost of the repairs all while showing clips of what looks to be some sort of alien violently swiping at Avengers and destroying buildings with long, sweeping flicks of his tail.

“I don’t think they be showing these clips on the news,” David comments, frowning as Spider-Man’s batted airborne by a particularly vicious upwards blow to his side. “I know the guy isn’t human, but that’s got to hurt.” He winces in sympathy as the roof of a house three streets away splinters when the Avenger barrels though upon landing.

May flinches as the impact, looks away as the building collapses and the rubble falls like she just doesn’t want to see. It’s typical May, she became a nurse for a reason just like he did, hates to see people getting hurt and Peter, just as typically him, frowns up at her and nudges his head against her shoulder to get her attention.

“Hey, I’m sure he’s fine, May,” he reassures gently against her side despite having an arm hugging his own ribs in sympathy. “He’s like, super strong, and he heals real quick.”

May’s eyes leave her knees and find his as she sighs at his remark. “I know, he’s very brave,” she says with a sad smile, leaning over to kiss the top of his head. “But that still doesn’t mean I like him getting hurt in the first place.”

Judging by the speed at which the red and gold figure on the TV reaches the collapsed building, David doesn’t think Iron Man likes Spider-Man getting hurt in the first place either.

He kind of wishes the man would care for the intern he’s running into the ground even half as much.

The next weekend, Stark takes Peter along to his latest product launch in LA. It isn’t a huge event, or so Peter says, but it’s still big enough they still see clips of Start launching his arc reactor powered car on the news that evening. David doesn’t know much about the car industry, or even the energy industry, but even he knows what Stark has done is an impressive advancement in terms of environmentally friendly travel.

There are other clips from the conference too, one of Stark talking to a collection of reporters, one of the audience clapping, one of Stark at the after event with his wife and young daughter, Molly maybe, he thinks it begins with M anyway, and, somewhat unexpectedly, Peter.

The kid looks the smartest David’s ever seen him in a well cut black suit he knows probably costs more than his car, and his curls have rather uncharacteristically been tamed by something more effective than a damp comb. The expression he’s wearing is all Peter, though, all awe and exhilaration and unabashed admiration for his boss, and even through the camera David can see he’s so excited by the event he’s practically vibrating on the spot.

There’s no audio to the clip, just the news reader talking over their silent conversations, so it isn’t possible to hear what Peter, features alight and hand pointing at something offscreen, says to Stark as he arrives and absentmindedly accepts his daughter from his wife, but whatever it is clearly amuses Stark by because he laughs aloud, mouth open in a wide grin that crinkles his eyes. He says something back, the words again lost, and then, entirely unexpectedly, Tony Stark, genius, billionaire, Iron-man, throws a casual arm around Peter Parker’s lithe shoulders.

And the weirdest bit, is that neither Peter, nor Stark’s wife, nor his daughter, nor May seem in the least bit perturbed by the gesture. 

The media, on the other hand, are.

The resulting commotion doesn’t die down for days.

Apparently, Tony Stark follows Peter on Instagram.

It’s a recent development, one David just happened to walk right into the middle of when he returns from work with a raging headache the following Thursday evening. He sighs semi-fondly at the two excited teenagers in the lounge, heads to the kitchen in search of Tylenol, and only after washing a couple down with a glass of water does he have the mental energy to even wonder what is going on.

“-it’s at one point two million now, and I’ve got- holy shit-”

“Language, Peter!”

“May, I’ve got 37 thousand followers!” Peter exclaims to his aunt in defence, his eyes wide, as David walks back into the room. “37 thousand!”

“Where’s the fire?” David asks him, reaching over to put an arm around a bemused looking May. Peter’s so focused on his phone he forgets to pretend to be disgusted when May gives him a welcome home kiss in return.

“On Peter’s Instagram account!” Ned blurts before Peter looks to have even comprehended the question let alone thought of a reply. “Mr Stark tagged him in a photo, like, an hour ago, and his account blew up! He’s got 37 thous-”

“Oh god, 38 now,” Peter interrupts, brown eyes wide as saucers as he stares at his phone. “I’ve got 38 thousand followers?”

“I take it that’s a lot?”

Ned nearly chokes on his cola. “It’s an insane number!”

“I had, like, 12 this morning,” Peter adds to clarify. David raises his eyebrows at the increase, then turns at the voice originating from the corner of the room.

“You had 143,” Michelle casually corrects over the top of her book from the chair he hadn’t realised she was occupying between his headache and the two excited boys. “I wasn’t being obsessive, I just happened to look.”

“That’s _really_ not the point, MJ!” Ned argues back, and David rolls his eyes, regrets it when his head throbs, and then mutters to May that he’s going to get changed.

“I’m just saying,” Michelle’s voice echoes as he leaves, “there’s no point stating figures if they’re incorre-”

David shuts the door. The noise quietens. Rubbing his head, he sits down on the bed and, then, a second later, takes his phone from his pocket. It’s coming out because he’s changing, that’s what he tells himself, but then he finds himself curiously scrolling through his apps until he finds his own installation of Instagram.

It’s May’s doing, not his, he doesn’t even know how to work it really, so it takes him a few minutes of rootling around once the app is open to find Peter’s account with its 38 thousand followers and counting, and a few minutes more to work out how to find his tagged images, but then yeah, there it is. The image that’s the root cause of his lost peaceful evening. 

The photo Peter’s been tagged in has been uploaded by the Stark Industries Instagram page rather than Tony Stark’s like he’d expected it to have been, but it’s clearly been put there and captioned by Stark himself. _His name’s Peter, he’s my intern_ it reads, in what David knows to be a blunt reply to the reporters who have been calling Peter Stark’s secret son since LA.

The image is there to serve a purpose, he knows, but it’s actually a nice image of Peter too. His smile is genuine, his eyes bright and warm and a little wider than normal as though he wasn’t aware the photo was going to be taken for long before it was. He looks happy, though, like he’s not just smiling because that’s how photos work. Or selfies, really, because that’s what it is; a selfie, taken by Tony Stark himself.

In classic Stark fashion, the man is wearing a three piece suit and pink sunglasses despite being sat at a bench in his lab, but with his sleeves rolled up and his waistcoat unbuttoned and a grin to match Peter’s on his lips, he looks more relaxed than David’s ever seen him. He looks happy too, like he’s enjoying sharing his own private lab with a teenager, like he doesn’t care Peter’s holding what can only be millions of dollars of arc reactor in his sticky hands.

Tony’s hand, the one not holding the phone, is resting on Peter, his arm draped casually across his young intern’s shoulders just like in the news footage taken in LA. It’s a bit of a feat considering they’re both sat on lab stools behind a desk, and as a result Tony’s whole body is leaning precariously sideways, his weight on Peter, but neither of them looks at all uncomfortable.

It’s like they think it’s the most natural thing in the world.

But, when he thinks about it, David doesn’t.

Peter’s a good kid, a great, clever, loving kid. He’s special. But is he special enough for Tony Stark to take him under his wing like that? Probably not, and that’s got nothing to do with Peter.

Tony Stark is a billionaire who earnt his money making bombs. He’s changed now, apparently, makes green energy devices and high tech prosthetics, has softened since the birth of his daughter.

And yeah, David knows he nearly gave his life getting the missing half of the population back after the snap, knows he gave an arm and spent months afterwards recovering in hospital, but he doesn’t think he’s changed enough for him to be spending so much time mentoring a random teenager.

Besides, the internship started long before that, back years before the blip. 

Peter’s follower count ticks over to 39,000 as he watches, and then up to 40,000 as he thinks.

It’s no wonder that being tagged in an image by Stark Industries and then followed by Tony Stark does wonders for your follower count, but David worries what the benefits are of following orphaned teenagers from Queens.

Publicity, he thinks, and he hopes Peter realises that sooner rather than later.

A few weeks later, Stark takes Peter to a conference, this time in Florida. He posts a series of picture of them there on his Instagram, some of them in at the conference, other distinctly more casual, and writes _work hard, play harder_ as the caption. The kid seems much more excited about it, and his first trip to Disneyworld, than David is.

The media, and 4.4 million people on Instagram, like the images too.

The third image of Peter gets uploaded on one of the Saturday nights he’s away at the Avenger’s compound for the internship. It isn’t a surprise by now, Peter’s almost becoming a regular feature of Tony Stark’s Instagram accounts, except, it sort of is, in that according to the photo, Peter isn’t actually at the compound where David knows he should be. He’s at Tony Stark’s place by the looks of it, probably the house beside the lake rather than the apartment in the city judging by the exposed beams in the ceiling and the cosy looking furniture.

What’s also unusual is that it certainly wasn’t Stark who uploaded the photo to his Instagram account.

That much is obvious seeing as he’s asleep in the photo, napping on the sofa with his head back against the cushion and a blanket over his knees, and the caption below reads _Worn out by the kids. getting old, Tones?._

Judging by the tone, it isn’t Mrs Stark who has written the comment, but David’s much too caught up on the word _kids_ to worry about that.

Kids. Not kid.

It’s plural. 

That isn’t going to help the rumours that Peter’s Stark’s illegitimate heir at all.

Neither is the fact that with his daughter grinning cheekily in her onesie on one side and Peter also awake but clearly dressed for bed in hello kitty pyjama bottoms and a ratty sweater on the other, it’s impossible to differentiate between the kid that is Stark’s and the one that is not.

That they’re both holding up bunny ear fingers behind Stark’s head as he sleeps just increases the family vibe of the photo too.

“What does he want from Peter?” David asks with a sigh. 

Beside him, May frowns in confusion and then leans over to look at his phone screen.

“Tony? Oh, nothing.”

“Then why do this? It’s for publicity, isn’t it?”

May smiles, presses a kiss to his cheek. “It’s sweet you care about him so much, but that’s the thing, Tony does too. He doesn’t want anything from Peter other than for him to be happy.”

“Why? He isn’t actually Stark’s kid, is he?”

May laughs out loud, doesn’t dignify his question with an answer. “He just does.” She takes the phone to get a proper look at the Instagram post, likes it with a torn sort of smile. “I don’t like him much, he’s a self-centred, arrogant, asshole who’s far too used to walking over others to even notice he’s doing it anymore, but he really does care about Peter. Maybe even as much as he cares about Morgan.”

David takes the phone back with a frown. He wants to believe her, but he isn’t sure he does.

Despite all the time Peter spends with Tony Stark, May doesn’t usually have much contact with him, which is why it’s a bit of a surprise when she pulls her vibrating phone from her bag and Stark, Tony, is written on the caller ID.

They’re in a restaurant at the time, a nice Italian a few streets down from May’s apartment, for their first date night out in a while. It’s nice, a good change from the domestic rut they’ve ended up in recently as they’ve gone from dating to a longer term relationship, and the food is just as good as May had promised.

It’s the main course that’s interrupted by the phone call, and May’s grimacing as she puts down her cutlery and opens her bag to search for it, muttering a threat under her breath to her work because if they call her in one more time on her one night off a week…

But it isn’t work.

And it isn’t Peter which is the real reason May was checking, David knows. Peter’s calls never go unanswered.

“Tony?” May’s frowning as she answers, and her frown deepens as she listens, commenting occasionally but saying nothing David can make out the other side of the conversation from. He reaches out to take her free hand, giving it a comforting squeeze because clearly this isn’t a phone call she’s enjoying. It isn’t a conversation he’s enjoying either, because there is really only reason Tony and May talk, and that’s regarding a certain 17 year old.

Eventually, May sighs tiredly. “Yeah, of course. We’ll head back now. Tell him I love him for me.”

“What’s happened. Is Peter okay?” David asks as soon as May’s hung up the call. She shakes her head, pushes her glasses up onto her head to rub at her eyes as though dispelling a headache.

“There was an accident in Tony’s lab. Peter’s got a concussion. Tony offered to keep him at his for the night, but Peter wants to come home so Tony’s bringing him.”

“Is he alright? A concussion… he ought to be checked out at the hospital really.”

May shakes her head again. “He’s been to the Medbay at the tower, they said he’s fine to go home, just sore.” She sighs tiredly, resignedly, like she isn’t surprised this has happened, just sad, like maybe it’s happened before, and then frowns at her food as though suddenly realising she’s ruined their date night. David doesn’t care about that in the slightest.

They’ve been home barely five minutes when there’s the sound of a key in the lock, and when David steps out from the kitchen, he finds Tony Stark letting himself into May’s apartment.

Tony Stark.

Iron Man himself.

David doesn’t like him all that much either, never has, and probably never will if he keeps working Peter to the bone, but there’s still something unreal about being in the same room as him.

He’s shorter in person, David realises, has the benefit of good camera angles and a stage when normally seen by most, but he’s still taller than the teenager leaning so heavily against his side a gentle breeze could probably blow him over if it weren’t for the arm wrapped around his shoulder.

Peter, who judging by his lack of balance and the emesis basin clutched in the hand not clinging to Stark’s jacket like a lifeline, is definitely concussed.

The poor kid.

“Oh, Peter.”

Peter flinches at his name as though the very sound hurts, but then eases his face out from where it has been buried against Stark’s shoulder and seeks out his aunt.

“’m okay, May, ‘s jus’- jus’ a concussion.”

Well, that was unconvincingly slurred.

It doesn’t help Peter’s argument that beneath a pair of blue sunglasses so outrageous they could only have come from one man, he’s the palest David’s ever seen him, his skin a greenish sort grey except for the patch of already dark bruising spilling out over his temple. Despite the dizzy sort of swaying as he tries unsuccessfully to support more of his own weight, he looks tense, his whole body coiled and the skin around his mouth and the corner of his squinted eyes pinched in a way that makes him look very much not okay.

David, realisation hitting home, flicks off the main light.

The relief is instantaneous.

“Thanks,” Peter breathes, untensing a little as brightness reduces to the soft glow left by the light filtering through open kitchen doorway. He relaxes a little more when May slips an arm under his and supports his other side, and then starts to stumble forward again when Stark leads him into the room.

“Come on buddy, lets get you sitting down before one of us has to scoop you from the carpet again. I don’t think my back can manage it a second time today.”

Despite the unconvincingly slurred protests that he’s fine and that he just wants to go to bed, May and Stark take Peter to the sofa. It’s closer, and a better place for him to be kept an eye on, and it turns out to be for the best when Peter’s sense of balance gives up entirely half-way there right next to a convenient armchair.

Faltering under his weight, they lower him into it, then May keeps a hand on his shoulder to hold him there as he slumps dizzily back against the cushions, the bowl hugged to his chest and his lips tightly sealed. Her other hand cards gently through his hair, at first examining, and then after a wince from both of them, moving to sooth the uninjured side.

“Oh, baby.”

“‘m really sorry, May,” Peter mutters as he leans into her touch, his eyes closed and his breathing a little shaky. He’s so pale he looks almost translucent in the dim lighting. He swallows thickly, and then, “Where’s Tony?”

“I’m right here, Underoos.” The words are whispered, so soft they’re almost inaudible, and spoken as he gently takes hold of one of Peter’s hands around the bowl and squeezes gently. “You’ve got me and May right here. You’re okay, you’re not alone.”

Peter nods, then moans softly and roll his head into the cushion. “Feel really sick again,” he whimpers. A second later, he struggles back upright with more urgency than balance, and then, worryingly, gags into the bowl. Nothing but bile comes up, but David suspects that’s not through his stomach not trying.

The kid spits saliva, then groans out a pained sob and closes his pinched eyes against the light. May’s hand moves to rub his back when he gags again, muttering comfortingly as his empty stomach spasms.

David doesn’t like it, and not only because he doesn’t like seeing the poor kid in pain.

Apparently May doesn’t either.

“Tony?”

“He had a head CT at the tower,” Stark reassures distractedly as he frowns at Peter, the hand freed when the kid had let go to grab the bowl tighter to his chest rubbing over his knee. Apparently even he is worried enough to know what is bothering May. “The results came back clean.”

Although her lips say pursed and none of the concern leaves her eyes, May nods and resumes comforting her nephew as best she can. 

David isn’t quite so easily convinced.

“I think it would still be a good idea to get him seen at a proper hospital,” he protests awkwardly, frowning worriedly at the kid as he swallows thickly and tightens his grip on the bowl. “He’s vomiting a lot, even for someone with a concussion.”

“A proper hospital?” Stark scoffs as the kid settles again from the false alarm, turning with a raised brow to look over once the basin is limp in his grasp again. It’s the first time he seems to have noticed him since arriving, and so the first look David gets from Tony Stark is one of irritation. He tries not to flinch at the harsh glare or the acid words that follow. “He doesn’t need a ‘proper hospital’; he’s been seen by one of the best neurologists in the country at the most high-tech medical facility in New York, or is that not good enough for you?”

“Tony-”

“A hospital would have kept him in for observations,” David argues back coolly, standing up to his full height. He’s taller than Stark, a fact he normally wouldn’t care less about, but then he wouldn’t normally be disagreeing with Tony Stark about his own profession and the frankly concerning state of health of his own kid either. “With symptoms as serious as these he ought to be monitored even with a clean CT.”

Tony scoffs. “My staff assured me there was no reason to keep him in and he wanted to come home.”

“He’s still throwing up and in pain, those are pretty good reasons,” David snaps back, “and not only because they have medicines to help with that there but because sometimes, and I really hope they don’t in this case, but sometimes those symptoms are signs things will get worse.”

May puts a hand on his arm. “David, I’m sure-”

“There’s nothing to get worse,” Tony snaps over the top of her. “No fractures, no bleeding, no swelling, we checked, thoroughly, in machines much more advanced than any you could find in one of your proper hospitals.”

“I still-”

“Can you two jus’- jus’ be quiet. Please?”

David’s argument disintegrates on his tongue. He turns back to Peter at the exact moment Stark does, and finds those squinted, pained eyes flicking between the two of them from behind the sunglasses.

“Or like, go compare sizes, out in th’ hall or something? My head… really hurts, and this’s’n’t helping.”

May snorts softly and soothes his hair again, and Stark looks like he can’t decide whether to laugh or pout, but David frowns.

“Does it hurt worse than before?”

Peter’s lip twitches in a weary smile. “No, ‘s okay. And ‘m- ‘m alright, seriously, I jus’ want to go to bed. Or jus’ like, lay in the dark or something ‘cause you’re probably not gonna let me sleep.” He stops, swallows, rolls his head slowly against the cushion. “‘nd Mis’er Stark?”

“Kid?”

“Stop… stop… that,” he amends like he can’t find the word he was looking for. “David jus’- just try’na help. He’s jus’ worried.”

Stark does pout a little this time and huffs indignantly, but May sighs and resumes stroking her boy’s hair. “We’re all worried, Peter.”

“I know, ‘m really sorry, May,” Peter murmurs, and May shakes her head and bends over to kiss his unbruised temple. He sags against her, leans into her arms, and lets his eyes flutter closed again. “Am I allowed to sleep? ‘m really tired.”

“David?”

Torn by the weakly muttered question and May’s hopefulness, David runs a hand through his hair. As a medical professional, he wants to not only say no, but gather the semi-conscious kid up in his arms and take him straight to the ER. It isn’t that he wants to put Peter through the torture of moving again and stoke his unstable stomach with another car journey, but he’s seen enough unconscious kids brought into his PICU with head injuries that had seemed minor only an hour before to know how dangerous they can be. A small brain bleed can be almost invisible on a CT at first, the initial symptoms so easily mistaken for a concussion that no one suspects anything is wrong before enough pressure builds up to start causing damage. 

He only relents because it’s three vs one and Peter’s head looks like it’s causing him enough pain without them putting him through another argument. “Fine, he can stay here, but if there’s any deterioration at all and he needs to go to the hospital,” he sighs reluctantly. “Does he have anything for the pain. If not, I can write him a script?”

Twenty minutes later, Peter’s curled up under a blanket on the sofa, his head on his pillow and his face buried in the back cushion in search of the dark. Judging by the tension in his back, he isn’t asleep, and David doubts he will be until the painkillers Stark brought out of his pocket kick in enough to allow him some relief.

He’d taken some at the compound earlier, apparently, but David isn’t all that surprised they haven’t worked all that well since it seems Peter’s been throwing up on and off since he took them. Well, since he woke up after headbutting a steel support beam.

The poor kid.

David’s only known him six months and it still hurts to see him like this.

May looks hurt too as she sits on the arm of the sofa beside him, one hand carding through his curls and a frown on her brow. David hates to disturb her, but he has a question, and at this point, he isn’t sure waiting to ask is much of a choice.

“May, do you know what these are?” he asks her when she joins him in the kitchen. The Stark Industries branded bottle in his hand is the same one Stark had brought from his pocket a little while before, the one Peter had gratefully swallowed a couple of plain white pills from once his nausea had settled enough he didn’t think he was going to bring them up again straight away. “I’ve never heard of these tablets before.”

“They’re painkillers for Peter,” May says looks a bit caught out, then frowns at his raised brow. “No, no I know what you’re asking. They’re- um, they’re made for Peter. You haven’t heard of them before because they’re not standard. Normal painkillers don’t work for him, so Tony made him those.”

David’s eyes widen in alarm to the extent it would be comical if the situation wasn’t so disturbing. “That’s-”

May shakes her head. “I know, I know, don’t,” she protests before he can start. “I don’t like that he’s using unregulated medicine either, it’s terrifying, but Tony’s team is good, they’re very thorough, and it’s better than leaving him in pain.”

“There must be something else,” David argues shakily, still trying to get his head around the fact that Tony Stark is giving unregulated medicine to his intern. An intern who isn’t even old enough to consent to it himself.

An actual kid.

May huffs like he’s just told a bad joke. “No, there isn’t, trust me. We’ve tried everything.”

“May-”

“David, please,” she interrupts, cutting him off. She doesn’t say anything else, just stands there looking worn, haunted, like she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders. Like she’s been through the heartbreak of seeing her boy in pain and had no way of solving it, David assumes. 

“I don’t like this,” he relents, sighing and leaning back against the counter. The neat little medicine bottle feels very heavy in his hand.

May shakes her head grimly. “I know, nor do I, but it’s the best he’s got.”

When David heads back through to the lounge, he finds Tony Stark sitting on the floor beside the sofa. He wants to snap at the man, tell him he’s an arrogant asshole, that those pills could be doing Peter more harm than good, but the sight of Peter, his posture relaxed and his breathing even, stops him in his tracks. As he sleeps, his boss is tenderly running a hand through his hair just as May had been doing before he called her away.

It’s so paternal David wants to scream.

Tony Stark shouldn’t be paternal, not to Peter anyway. Tony Stark is Tony Stark. He’s Iron Man. He made a fortune selling bombs, spent that fortune having a good time, never cared for anyone except himself. David had been sure he was using his poor intern for a publicity stunt, had been just about to yell at the man for giving his teenager experimental drugs.

He doesn’t though, and not just because Peter is _finally_ free from pain, but because maybe, just maybe, he had been wrong about Tony Stark. Wrong about his relationship with Peter anyway, because there’s no way Tony’s rumpling his suit on the floor of a darkened room closed off from Instagram and the media for any other reason than because he really does care for the boy he’s inadvertently concussed.

It wasn’t an act. David can see that now in Tony’s posture as he cards his hand through those dark curls, can read it in the concern in his eyes as Peter snuffles and grimaces and threatens to wake, can hear it in his voice as he reminds his kid everything’s okay and soothes him back to sleep.

He knows he was wrong, the realisation has hit him like the piece of metal that nearly battered in Peter’s head, but while he now knows that Tony Stark cares for Peter, that he cares for him as much as a parent would for their kid, that just leads to another question:

Why?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm tempted to write Tony's perspective of this, make a "five times Tony was jealous of May's new boyfriend, and the one time he realised Peter deserved all the love he could get" spin off. Thoughts? Suggestions?


	4. Accident Prone?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hands up if you went to give a chapter a final proof-read, changed the tone, added 1000 new words and a whole new scene, and then changed the ending and are now terrified it's all off? 
> 
> Just me? Oh. Okay. 
> 
> Seriously though, thank you so much to anyone who's read, kudosed, bookmarked or commented on this fic! You're all amazing
> 
> TW: Blood

It’s only after the concussion incident that David realises the fourth odd thing about Peter. Or the pattern of things really, because one bruise wouldn’t have been much of a mystery, Peter is a clumsy kid after all, but it isn’t just one bruise.

It’s a lot of bruises. And scrapes. And stiff movements. And slight limps. And on one memorable occasion, a bloody nose he insists he got from a slammed door which resulted in two impressive shiners just before school picture day.

May had seemed more cross with him than concerned about that one, but David noticed the grief-stricken look she gave her nephew’s back after he’d turned away after her scolding. 

Despite not wanting to overstep the mark, he does ask Peter what happened each time, lets him know he’s there if he needs anything, he’s a PICU nurse, after all, he’s had training, but each time Peter waves off both his offer and his concern with what he thinks is supposed to be a comforting grin.

It’s just, there’s not much comforting about hearing your kid lisp that he’s fine around a puffy split lip.

Despite the reassurances that come after every bruise and scrape, it doesn’t take David long to wonder what is going on.

Peter still seems that happy-go-lucky kid he met that first night, at least when he knows he’s being watched anyway, and he’s never injured badly enough to need hospital treatment or not heal up within a few days, but he’s still hurt often enough that David worries something’s wrong. He doesn’t like it.

He knows May doesn’t like it either. He sees the looks she gives her nephew when he’s bruised, sees how she’s more upset by Peter’s pain than he is. Not that that doesn’t make sense. Peter’s a teenager, and a strong one at that.

It’s after David arrives after work one Saturday evening that he corners an irritated May and quietly asks her if she knows what’s going on with Peter while keeping a watchful eye on the back of the kid in question’s head as he obviously plays some sort of Mario based video game with Ned on a dated Nintendo console the two of them had salvaged from a yard sale. It arrived in the apartment a few months back sitting pride of place on the dining room table beside a beaming Peter while they ate their evening meal, but this is the first time David’s seen it running. The parts to repair it have been a headache to find, apparently. 

Peter’s winning the game they’re playing, he thinks, judging by their shouts and the fact Peter keeps leaning in time with the movements of the little red character who is certainly winning. It’s actually pretty impressive of him since there’s an icepack balanced precariously on his swollen right wrist.

May tells him it’s just a sprain, a result of a poorly descended staircase, and then grimaces when he points out the pattern he’s noticed, flicks her eyes to the boys sitting in the lounge and then beckons him from the room.

The explanation David gets is one that’s whispered and short and sad, just that Peter’s too good a kid, that he can’t help sticking up for people, always puts them first without a single thought for his own wellbeing, and when he tries to probe further, she stutters a little about bullying, and then shakes her head when he suggests complaining to the fancy school the kid is at and tells him she’s already done that.

It turns out a school being zero tolerance on bullying on a paper means very little in reality.

It also turns out May’s wrong about Peter’s wrist, as he finds out when he catches the boy breathing through clenched teeth after knocking it on a chair and eventually convinces him to let him have a look.

It isn’t long before his gentle probing finds a point where the bone gives beneath his fingertips, and the steadfast, blank expression Peter’s been holding instantly cracks. He draws in a hissed breath through his teeth and the arm jolts a little in David’s grip as Peter fights the instinct to pull away from the pain.

“Oh buddy, I’m sorry,” David winces, releasing the bruised limb and letting Peter cradle it protectively to his stomach. “I’m pretty sure that’s broken though. We should probably get you to the ER.”

Unbelievably, or maybe not so unbelievable considering who he’s talking to, Peter shakes his head, his doe-like eyes widening, and then launches into blurted, anxious protest.

“Please, David, we can go tomorrow. If it’s still bad. It’s just it’s- it’s late now, a-and May’s asleep already and she’s got work tomorrow, a long shift, and I don’t want to make her any more tired than she already is and-”

“Peter-”

“- and she’s had a really long week already because she’s worked like three extra shifts and then there was that accident up on Main Street yesterday and she didn’t get home until really late. A-and what if it isn’t even broken? She’d be tired tomorrow for no reason so it just- it makes more sense to go tomorrow?”

It’s David who relents this time, although more because he knows with a simple, non-displaced fracture like the one he’s just found, there’s little risk with waiting until the morning for an x-ray than because he doesn’t want to wake May. She would be tired tomorrow if she spent her night in the ER rather than her bed, but it isn’t like she wouldn’t do ten times that any day for her kid.

Peter isn’t the only self-sacrificial Parker in the apartment. 

Reluctantly, he wraps Peter’s wrist for him, it is too swollen to be put in a cast at the moment anyway, then gets him some more ice and a couple of those funky Stark Industries painkillers he only barely tolerates when it turns out he hasn’t had any, and sends him off to bed.

That night he sleeps poorly, on edge and worried, and in the morning, he gets up early so he can take another look at the kid’s wrist before May heads off to work or Peter leaves for the day. He’s fully prepared to argue with Peter about the ER trip, but it turns out that’s not necessary, and not because Peter goes willingly.

“Must have just been a sprain,” Peter says with a shrug, innocently watching as David examines his still bruised and sore but definitely better than it had been the night before wrist.

“Yeah, I guess so,” David agrees hesitantly, still probing the kid’s arm with a confused frown in search for the break in his ulna he’s certain he found the night before.

He never does find it, and when he sees Peter again two days later, he’s crawling around on the floor searching for a misplaced Lego mini-figure knocked from the spaceship Ned is holding, unbothered by his wrist entirely.

David decides he must have made a mistake, must have imagined the flex he’d felt in Peter’s bone; it’s the only reasonable explanation. Fractures don’t heal overnight, and that’s a fact. 

Eventually, blessedly, the summer holidays arrive, but things with Peter don’t get better as he’d expected. They get worse. More bruises, more scrapes, two ribs he’s sure were broken but turned out to be bruised in early July. And it’s then that he begins to see another correlation.

Peter spends nearly all of each day at his internship now school is out, often doesn’t return home until late at night if he returns at all. Some nights he says he’s sleeping at Ned’s or MJ’s or the Avengers Compound or Tony’s place instead of in his own bed. And David’s fine with that, wouldn’t say anything against it even if he wasn’t because Peter’s May’s kid, not his, and he’s 17 now so isn’t quite a kid anymore anyway, except, he begins to notice that it’s after those nights and weekends away that Peter most frequently comes home hurt.

He doesn’t say anything to May about it, doesn’t know how to say anything to Peter, but he begins to wonder exactly what is going on with his internship.

A few weeks later, after an evening spent helping May deal with the fallout of a nausea inducing headache Peter swore was a migraine but that David would have been sure was another concussion had it not resolved entirely overnight, he begins to worry.

He worries something is going on there that shouldn’t be, that the bullying May thought was happening at school may actually come from people older and stronger than their kid, people entrusted with his care. People like Tony, his brain prompts before he actively shakes away the thought.

But then, as the summer progresses, he begins to wonder if maybe Peter isn’t spending as much time at the internship as much as he says he is, if he might not be staying at the Compound on the nights he’s not at home or Ned’s. For all his talents, Peter isn’t a good liar, and even if he was, David’s now around enough to notice the inconsistencies in his stories.

With that realisation, he ends up more worried than he was before, wonders what on earth Peter could be doing, what he’s playing at sneaking out at night.

Because he is sneaking out, David’s noticed now, disappearing down the fire escape outside his window after they’ve gone to bed, coming back at dawn, sleeping in on the mornings he can or just not sleeping when he hasn’t the time.

No wonder he always looks so damn tired all the time. The circles so dark under his eyes they may as well be bruises finally make sense.

David wants to say something to May, but he’s almost certain she already knows.

He’s caught her breaking off arguing with Peter when he enters the room often enough.

He’s still stressing over what to do about it, what to say, when Peter sneaks in one night when May’s at work and instead of going straight to bed like he usually does, he starts clattering around in the bathroom.

David, still in bed and half asleep, almost leaves him to it, almost, but then he hears a muttered ‘Shit’ and a groan of pain, and that’s when he gets up to investigate.

Peter’s still in the bathroom when he finds him, the light on and the door ajar, and when he knocks quietly and then pushes it open, he finds himself stopping and staring, his eyes wide as saucers.

“What the hell.”

Peter turns abruptly, freezes like a deer in the headlights. His mouth hangs a little open, his expression is instantly a little guilty, and a whole lot of blood continues trailing down his arm. It drips off his fingertips, falling with quiet plinks onto the lino below. His face is a mess too, his nose crusty with dried blood and his skin pale and one eye red with early bruising and beginning to swell.

It isn’t really the blood or bruising David is staring at though, he’s seen Peter bleed before, is heartbreakingly used to the kid being hurt by this point, but rather the needle and thread Peter has already started using to sew shut his wound.

His first thought is of infection, but then he realises Peter isn’t using cotton thread and a needle scavenged from the sewing kit May stores on the shelf above the washer. It’s all medical grade, the thin curved suture needle and nylon thread sterile and fresh from their Stark Industries packaging.

For a second, David’s relived, then the reality of what he’s just found Peter doing hits him again.

“What the hell, Peter?”

Peter flinches, shrinks back into himself a little, but the exclamation does at least jolt him into action.

“It’s not what it looks like.”

Despite his heart still thrumming in his throat, David’s eyebrows shoot towards his hairline at the kid’s gall. “I mean, it sure looks like you sewing yourself up in the bathroom, but if you’ve got another explanation for me, I’d love to hear it.”

Apparently, but not unexpectedly, there is no other explanation, and Peter stays helplessly silent. He looks apprehensive enough that David knows for sure his fingers would be restlessly playing with the hem of his NASA branded t-shirt if both hands weren’t already occupied or glistening with blood.

For a long moment, they stand there, David still not fully believing what he’s just found, and Peter staring at his feet while blood stains floor beside them. There’s some on the counter too, David belatedly realises, splats of viscous crimson and diluted and pink pools that spread out around the edge of the sink, seeping under the bottles on the counter and soaking into the label of the small white painkiller bottle discarded on its side.

Even the washcloth in the sink is dyed a sickening, blotchy red.

Forcing his eyes back from his new abattoir aesthetic bathroom to the still bleeding kid in the middle of it, David lets out a shuddering breath and rubs a shaky hand over his sleep-gritty eyes to check he isn’t dreaming.

He knows he’d rather be.

He doesn’t want this to be real at all.

“Can I take a look?” he asks eventually, breaking the heavy silence, and lifts a hand to vaguely indicate the wound on Peter’s bicep. 

With his eyes still on the floor and a grimace on his lips, Peter nods, and then, seeming to realise what he’s done to the room, pushes the stained towel he’s got heaped on the lid of the toilet onto the floor and makes a half-hearted attempt at cleaning up the blood by kicking it around.

He may as well be bailing a sinking boat with a colander for all the effect he’s having.

David rolls his eyes, motions for the kid to sit down on the recently vacated lid as he steps into the room. “I’m a nurse, Pete, I can handle blood.”

It turns out the cut isn’t actually as bad as it had looked from the doorway. It’s deep, almost down to the bone at one point, but whatever it was that sliced into Peter missed anything vital and left a wound that’s neatly cut rather than torn, the flesh inside clean and healthy and free of dirt.

Peter’s done a good job of washing it and, somehow, his stitching isn’t half bad either. It’s not the neatest but it is sturdy, good enough to leave in, and David wonders whether finishing the job himself rather than taking the kid to the ER would be morally something he could do. There wouldn’t be any local anaesthetic but seeing as he’s just found the kid sewing up himself, he doesn’t think Peter’s going to complain.

Just as he’d expected, Peter doesn’t protest the idea in the slightest.

If anything, he seems relived, and David would probably find that concerning if discovering Peter stitching up his own arm in the dead of night hadn’t already moved that ballpark a mile away. 

The onslaught of red and the tang of iron hanging heavy in the air hit just as heavy when David enters the bathroom a second time round, his reading glasses on his nose and a set of tweezers taken from May’s sewing kit in his hand. Peter doesn’t say anything, not when he returns and nor as he sterilises the wound again, but David doesn’t really expect him to without prompting. He knows the kid well enough now to understand his uncharacteristic quietness isn’t just anxiety as he waits for the lecture he knows is coming, but he can’t quite tell if Peter’s pissed at himself for getting caught, or David for interrupting his endeavour.

Either way, it hurts David’s heart to see.

Peter isn’t a tense kid by nature, not sad or sulky either, but something more than the stress of school and homework and exams has been getting him down of late. David doesn’t know if it’s brought on by the lack of sleep he’s getting, or a result of what he’s doing at night when he slips out, or the stress of whatever’s going on with his internship, but he really hopes it gets sorted soon, and more for Peter’s sake than his.

He deserves to be happy, and at the moment, David doesn’t think he is.

“So, why have you got these?” he asks casually of the needle and thread as he prepares to start closing the rest of the wound. It’s more of a distraction tactic than anything else, but he is also keen to know how Peter managed to get hold of a suture kit at three o’clock on a Wednesday morning. 

Peter shrugs and doesn’t take his eyes off the floor. “Would you rather I use May’s darning needle?” His tone is awkward, stiff, like he knows there’s little he can do to make light of what David’s found him doing.

David sighs at the kid’s evasiveness. “I’d rather you weren’t sewing up your own arm in the bathroom with anything to be honest.” He thinks as he does the first stitch, mutters a replying apology to Peter’s wince, and then, “Did Tony give it to you?”

“What? No! He wouldn’t do that,” Peter scoffs, but whether in defence or annoyance, David can’t tell. There’s a pause, and then after a second, a tired, resigned sigh. “But, um, it- um, they are his. I stole them from his Medbay. But like, a while ago.”

David frowns at the revelation. “I honestly don’t know if that’s better or worse than him giving it to you,” he admits after a second, wishing he wasn’t sewing up his kid in the bathroom if only so he could rub a tired hand over his face.

It’s as he does another stitch he realises the ‘a while ago’ comment must have been added because somehow Peter thinks him been prepared rather than just not wanting to stay after his theft for a professional stitching is an improvement, and he just wants to cry at the insanity of his kid.

“So, what happened?” he asks instead or crying or shouting or grabbing him by the shoulders and having a vain attempt at shaking some sense into him.

“With what?” The question would sound almost innocent if Peter’s voice wasn’t pitched an octave higher than normal and didn’t crack awkwardly in the middle of his short sentence.

“With your arm, Peter.”

“Oh, I, um, I caught it on a fence.”

“A fence?” Davis scoffs, one eyebrow shooting up towards his hairline. “It would have to have been a mighty sharp fence to do this.”

Apparently, Peter must have thought he would believe that one because he’s breathing briefly pauses before he forces himself to relax again. “Yeah, well, it- it was. It had razor wire on top. And I had to climb over to- to get my backpack back. I dropped it um, walking over a bridge.”

“Mm-hm. And what about your face? Don’t tell me you landed on a brick falling down on the other side.”

“Would you believe me if I did?” Peter asks hopefully enough David would laugh if he wasn’t sewing up his girlfriend’s teenager in their bathroom in the middle of the night.

“Not a chance.”

Peter huffs tiredly, deflates under his careful hands. “Maybe should have told you I was mugged.”

“Maybe you should tell me the truth.” A moment passes in which Peter stares at the floor and says nothing. The angle’s wrong for David to see his expression, but he thinks he might be pouting again. He decides to go for a different approach.

“May says you’re being bullied. Is all of this to do with that.”

It seems to take Peter a second to catch up with the change in conversation, but then he scoffs. “Oh, no. That’s-” he breaks off and sighs wearily. “I mean, she is right, I guess. It sounds stupid to say it though. Like, Flash, that’s his name, Flash is an asshole but I can handle it. I am handling it. He’s just had this vendetta against me since I beat him for the last place on the decathlon team back in 7th grade which is stupid. It doesn’t even matter anymore as he’s on the team now, but he’s kinda persistent.”

“Is it him that hits you?”

“What? No! Well, he used to shove me around a bit but I’m not scrawny enough for that anymore, and he was never bad, in- in that sense. Mostly he just says stuff. Like that Tony only gave me the internship out of pity, and he- erm, he calls me Penis. Like, Penis Parker. It- it kind of sucks, but, you know, whatever, I can handle it.”

Peter shrugs like he really doesn’t care, and David kind of believes him this time. Unless Peter’s acting classes are suddenly paying off and his Oscar is on its way, he thinks this Flash kid is more of an irritant than anything. Not that the bullying should be allowed to continue, even if Peter’s handling it.

“So, if it isn’t this kid, then what’s happening?”

“Nothing’s happening.”

“Peter,” he sighs tiredly. “We’ve seen the bruises. The scrapes. I’ve just found you stitching yourself up in the bathroom in the middle of the night.”

“It’s nothing. Really. I’m just- I’m just clumsy. Ask May.”

“Ask May?” He cocks an eyebrow, watches as Peter’s eyes widen almost comically in horror.

“Wait no, don’t do that,” he revises quickly. “She’ll just worry.” He watches as David ties off the last stitch and cuts the thread, and then turns, pushing the sleeve of his t-shirt down from where it’s been propped up on his shoulder. “Look, um, David, I really appreciate your help, but can you just drop it. Please? I’m okay, really.”

David exhales heavily, sadly, at the lie and runs a frustrated hand through his bed-messed hair. “I know, you’re always okay. I’m just… this has got me worried. You’ve got me worried. I care about you a lot, Pete, I don’t like to see you hurt.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry,” Peter tries, “It won’t happen again.” He sounds like he means it this time, but the thing is David doesn’t quite know what he means.

“You sneaking out and getting yourself hurt, or me finding you stitching yourself up in the bathroom?”

Peter flushes guiltily, a feat considering the amount of blood on the tiles, and looks away. He doesn’t dignify the question with an answer, just frowns at the floor like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar while David pushes up his shirt sleeve again and sticks a dressing on his arm.

They clean the bathroom together in stony silence, him wiping away the slightly concerning amount of blood while Peter packs up the first aid kit, and then Peter sits on his bed, sipping at pint of milk to replace the fluids he’s lost while David fetches an ice pack for his eye and some stain remover for his bedroom carpet. 

It doesn’t look quite as much like a possible murder scene as the bathroom, but it definitely needs to be cleaned before May comes home if they don’t want to both be on the receiving end of her sleep deprived fury. Not that she isn’t going to be upset when she finds out what’s happened in her home over her night shift anyway, but an additional ruined carpet certainly wouldn’t help things for them.

Half of David wants her to be annoyed, wants her to make a fuss and scare some sense into Peter before he gets himself seriously hurt, but the other half of him just wants the kid to get a break.

Secretly, David thinks he needs a break too. Before moving in with May, he hadn’t thought having a kid would be this stressful, but then again, maybe it isn’t normally.

“David?” Peter asks cautiously when he returns, ice and spray bottle in hand. “Do you think you can maybe not tell May about this? She’ll just worry, you know.” He accepts the ice pack but doesn’t use it. Maybe he thinks his kicked puppy dog look works better when he has two big brown eyes to beg with.

With one ringed with still forming bruising already even darker than his bags and his skin a couple of shades too pale, he looks pitiful enough that David sighs. “Is what you were doing to get yourself hurt illegal?”

Peter blinks in confusion at the question. There’s a funny sort of frown on his lips as he slowly shakes his head, but David doesn’t think he’s lying.

That’s one worry off his mind at least. 

“Okay, and do you promise me you’ll take more care of yourself when you’re sneaking out in the future? I’d ask you to promise to stop sneaking out at all, but I think we both know you’d be lying if you said you would.”

Peter flushes and looks away, but nods. He swallows, and then, “I’m not trying to get myself hurt,” he insists quietly, and his voice is suddenly much smaller than David has heard it for a while. He looks small too, tired, like the weight of the world is pressing on his thin shoulders. “I just… I can’t sleep. Okay? That’s what’s happening. And even when I do, I have n- I wake up again, and I hate just sitting here waiting for morning, s-so I’ve been going out to- to get some air.”

The tension cracks as wholly as Peter’s façade.

“Oh, Peter, I’m sorry,” David sighs, not altogether surprised by Peter’s admissions, but sad all the same. He doesn’t say anything else, just moves to sit on the bed beside his kid to show he’s there and gives him space to continue because he’s almost certain there’s more to come.

It doesn’t take long for his gamble to pay off, but unexpectedly, it isn’t an explanation as to what’s been keeping the kid up that he gets.

“There actually was a mugging,” Peter admits to his hands, “Not- not me, but I um- I went to help. I did help. She got away, but that’s- that’s how I got hurt. He had a knife.”

A cold nausea settles heavily in David’s gut and his heart picks up in his chest. Suddenly, he wants nothing more than to put an arm around his kid to prove to himself he’s really there and safe and alive, but he doesn’t. He’s not sure if Peter would want that.

“Shit, Peter, you could have been killed,” he breathes instead, the words a little shaky and rests his head in his hands. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Peter forcing a timid, comforting smile.

“I’m okay,” he insists quietly, “Relatively.”

David lets out a shaky exhale at Peter’s addition. Or maybe just in shock, he doesn’t know. He feels like he’s in shock, honestly isn’t sure how Peter isn’t at this point. Maybe he’s just used to it, his mind helpfully supplies. Maybe that’s how he’s getting hurt, fighting crime on the streets of Queens in the dead of night like some sort of teenage vigilante.

Exhaling, David shakes away the stupid thought because there’s no way that’s what’s happening.

That would be ridiculous, and honestly terrifying.

“David, please don’t tell May about this,” Peter says, drawing him back out of his head.

David looks up at the doe eyed kid, still pale faced and bruising but alive when he could have not been, and then pulls him into a desperate, unplanned hug. Peter resists briefly and David worries he’s overstepped the step-uncleing mark, but then there’s a sloshy clattering as the icepack is dropped onto the bed and a wiry set of arms wrap tightly around him in reply. A heavy head ends up rested on his shoulder, and David’s reminded once again just how young Peter is.

It hurts to think he might not have even made it to adulthood had the evening played out differently. 

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” he mutters into slightly iron-scented dark curls, “Seriously Peter. Please don’t do anything like that again.”

Peter sighs against his shoulder, mutters an apology into his t-shirt. David doesn’t quite know what he’s apologising for. Maybe it’s getting nearly getting killed breaking up a mugging. Maybe it’s not having promised not to do it again. Maybe it’s not having told the whole truth because even though David doesn’t doubt his story about the mugging, or his promise that he hasn’t been up to anything illegal, he’s sure there’s still more to say than Peter’s letting on.

He pulls away from the hug, gives Peter a look he ducks away from, and then relents. 

“Alright. Just this once,” he concedes, waiting for Peter to look up again with an expression of pure relief to finish. “I won’t tell May, not unless I need to. But I want you to sleep tonight, or try to sleep, anyway. You’re not to go wandering the streets again today, you need to rest your arm, let it heal. I’ll check it in the morning, make sure you don’t get an infection from that impressively sharp fence.”

Ignoring the weak barb about the fence, Peter grins wearily, relieved, and lifts the icepack to his eye. He winces a little when it touches, but its more from the cold than the bruise if David’s right. “Thanks, David, you’re the best. And thanks for-” he indicates his stitched arm- “You definitely did a better job than I would have done.”

David huffs a still slightly shaky laugh, gets back up to start on the carpet. “Thanks, kid, I’m glad the years of training taught me something.”

Peter’s near enough asleep by the time David’s ready to leave his room. His eyes have been at half-mast for a while, his body limp on his bed and his breathing slow as he watched David clean through his one good eye. He’s exhausted, clearly, and David knows he’s feeling the effects of having turned both his bedroom and the bathroom into murder scenes from his pallor and the lack of gusto as he protested David cleaning his carpet for him. 

He tucks the kid into bed, actually tucks him in despite Peter being 17 going on 30 and not even his kid in the first place, and then smooths his hair as he leaves.

“Get some rest, okay? And Peter?” A heavy set eye cracks open again. “I don’t know what’s really going on or what’s keeping you up at night, but if you want to talk about it, and you don’t want to tell May, I’m here, okay?”

Peter nods and mumbles his drowsy thanks into his pillow. David thinks he’s asleep before the light is even off.

It’s good, David’s pleased, the kid needs the rest, but if next time he could get some sleep without first being stabbed on one of his terrifyingly mysterious night-time adventures, well, that’d be really great too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come shout at me on tumblr at [tumblr](https://bumblie-bee.tumblr.com)


	5. A social setting only Avenger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought you guys might like to know I'm tired enough that this chapter nearly got published with "INSERT NAME OF BIG NEW YORK SHOP HERE" in the middle of it. fml
> 
> Also, enjoy the fluffiest thing I've ever written, only a teeny tiny bit of whump. 
> 
> It's the calm before the storm.  
> (heh ominous)

Peter knows the avengers.

It’s a fact David has known for a while, and considering the amount of time he spends at Stark Industries and the Avenger’s Compound, it isn’t one he’s all that surprised about.

There are definitely weirder things going on with Peter than him having met Iron Man’s colleagues. David’s well aware of that. He’s made a list. A mental one of course.

The most recent additions include Peter’s habit of wearing three sweaters to school every day for the past week, it’s been cold sure, but not _that_ cold, and the impressive set of abs David inadvertently caught a glance of when Peter tried, and eventually succeeded, to remove all three sweaters at once upon returning home.

May had sighed at him from her chair as he struggled to free his head, given him the look reserved when her genius nephew did something truly ridiculous, and then went on to embarrass him further by telling David the tale of the time seven year old Peter had decided it would be fun to see how many t-shirts and sweaters he could wear at once, a game that had gone truly downhill for him when he tried to get them off again and ended crying in the cupboard for half an hour with his head trapped in the layers of wool along with his suddenly broken set of glasses.

Peter had flushed, sighed, “thanks May,” at his giggling aunt and scarpered off to his room with his armful of clothing before David could even consider asking him about either of the new additions to the list.

It turns out Peter’s relationship with the Avenger’s isn’t quite as distant as David had thought it was though.

They’re all on first name basis with him.

They invite him for takeaways and movie nights.

Bruce Banner helps Peter with his biology homework, and the guy with the arrows is teaching him how to use a bow, and according to May, the mountain of cookies that appeared in the kitchen on Sunday night were a result of Captain America deciding Peter needed to relax more, and that baking with him was the way to achieve that.

David agrees with Captain America about the kid needing to relax, but he still finds the entire situation insane.

He still doesn’t really understand why Tony Stark cares so much for Peter, but now he realises he’s got the entirely of the Avengers parenting his kid too.

He isn’t jealous exactly but…

Okay, yeah, he’s jealous.

Jealous of the literal Gods and superheroes and world renowned scientists who insist on competing with him for the position of Peter’s primary paternal figure.

And judging by who features most in Peter’s Instagram posts, he’s definitely losing.

The invitation to Tony Stark’s Christmas Party comes in October. Or Peter brings it home after a weekend at the Compound in October, to be precise.

“But it hasn’t even been Halloween yet?” groans May when Peter hands the silky, white envelope to her on his way into the kitchen. There’s calligraphy on the front of it, ‘The Parkers’ inked in looped green font, and David almost winces when he sees just how haphazardly Peter has torn open the back of the expensive paper.

The typical teenager.

In another typical teenager response, Peter shrugs in response to his aunt, grunts with his head in the fridge, and then says, “Pepper’s organised,” around a mouthful of the cold leftover lasagne he’s scavenged as though that’s a reasonable excuse for sending out Christmas invites a good month before anyone else has even considered hosting an event.

Maybe it is; it’s not like David’s ever had to organise a party for New York’s most famous engineer before but judging by her sigh as she takes the pocket-crumpled card inside from the ripped envelope, May doesn’t agree.

The invite to the party, an invite that’s handwritten in more inky green calligraphy on the thickest, softest card David’s ever come across, isn’t just for Peter and May, it turns out, but for him as well. It catches him out, but May doesn’t seem phased.

“You’re part of the family,” she tells him with a baffled frown as he reads over the invite for a fifth time just to check he’s not missed the sentence notifying him he’ll be blasted off the roof by the Iron Man suit and his remains fed to the reindeer if he dare enter the tower. Half of him wants to put the invite on a heater in search of a secret threat written in lemon juice, but then he realises if Tony had added one it wouldn’t have been nearly that subtle.

“David, why wouldn’t you be invited?”

David scoffs a laugh, puts the letter, now admittedly sans threat, down on the counter. “Because Tony Stark has met me once, and I think he would probably have tackled me to the floor, Iron Man suit or not, if Peter hadn’t stopped him.”

May chuckles at the memory, or maybe more at his way of putting it because the fact they’d been arguing over how to treat her poor kid’s head injury as he vomited into a bowl really wasn’t very funny, and then reaches up to give him a kiss.

“He doesn’t hate you,” she corrects with a smirk, “He’s just jealous Pete likes you.”

Her words take a second to sink in, and then David pulls away from the hug, holds May at arm’s length as he frowns at her for signs of mockery. He doesn’t find one. “Seriously?”

“Yes!” May laughs, her eyes bright with amusement behind her glasses.

David’s vaguely aware that his eyebrows are drawn so close together in confusion they’re forming a monobrow, but most of his brainpower is so stuck on this new, entirely bizarre revolution he can’t pull them back apart. “Tony Stark is jealous of me?”

“Yes!”

“Tony Stark as in Iron Man?” He frowns down at May with a dubiously raised brow because she’s clearly wrong even though it’s sweet she thinks it’s true. “Tony Stark as in the billionaire who owns Stark Industries? The self-proclaimed genius with an incredible collection of thousand dollar suits and a goatee to die for?” 

May laughs loudly. “YES!” she exclaims as she reaches up smack him playfully and then draws him into another kiss. “And do you know what? He has every right to be.”

Not a lot happens between the party invite arriving at the day itself. Peter continues with his internship, throws himself into senior year with renewed enthusiasm, spends time out with his friends and at home with him and May. He’s still busy, still tired, but he looks a little better than he had over the summer. The bruises under his eyes are no longer bags heavy enough to store a week’s shopping in, anyway.

He’s seeing a therapist now, too.

Every Tuesday after school for an hour he talks to someone trained to help him sort out his thoughts and his worries and, more importantly, his insomnia. As a result, he now seems to be spending most of his nights asleep rather than running about outside doing whatever the hell he was doing before to get himself hurt.

Things still aren’t perfect on that front; he still stays out late doing something David can’t quite figure out and so the bruises don’t stop completely, and he still manages to earn himself a concussion and a dislocated shoulder at what he says is a surprise Stark Internship weekend retreat in November, but at least he’s stopped sneaking into the apartment bleeding in the dead of night.

Well, David thinks he has anyway.

David doesn’t know for sure what caused the kid to change his mind about speaking to someone, both May and Tony had been trying to convince him it would help for a while, May finally admitted so after Peter relented, but it came soon enough after the bathroom suturing incident and Peter’s subsequent sudden retreat to Tony Stark’s Lakehouse that David can’t help but think they’re related events.

It would be too much of a coincidence if they weren’t.

Whatever the reason though, David’s pleased the kid is finally talking to someone. Not only is he less tired, less frequently hurt, but he seems genuinely happier now, more relaxed. His shoulders aren’t curled under the pressure of everything he’s been through quite as much anymore.

He’s still keeping secrets, David can tell, but he tries not to be hurt because Peter’s a teenager, a strong one too, and even though they’ve become closer, more like family now, he hasn’t even known him a year yet.

With Peter doing visibly better, May seems happier too. She’s less worried, less stressed, sleeps without tossing and turning, cuddles slightly more contently into David during the nights Peter is away, and so, all in all, everything’s going kind of okay. 

Or nearly everything anyway.

The party, Tony Stark’s party hosted nowhere other than in the penthouse of the former and now once again Stark Industries Tower, is scheduled for the Saturday before Christmas, and as much as David would like to have forgotten about it over the nine weeks between the invite arriving and the even itself, Ned’s excitement has left that entirely impossible.

The kid won’t stop talking about it, and his level of excitement has only grown the closer to the date they’ve got.

By the time he’s loaded into the back of the car with Peter and Michelle and on his way, he’s talking so fast with enthusiasm that David isn’t sure how he could possibly be getting enough air. He’s actually surprised the kid hasn’t lost his voice by the time they arrive. Either that or been punched into silence by Michelle, because she’s glaring over her book in a way that makes him think she’s as irritated as he is.

He’s pretty sure she dislikes Tony Stark almost as much as he does too.

She’s certainly made sure they’re all very aware she’s only coming because Peter’s going which he does think is kind of cute. 

The Stark Tower is intimidatingly impressive both inside and out, but David has to admit with the Christmas decorations hung inside, it is beautiful. They’re tasteful, glittery and bright but subtle enough not to make the foyer look like an excerpt from the Christmas display at Macy’s. The decorations lead the way to the elevator, lighting the floor and drawing the guests without explicitly telling which way to go. It’s clever, annoyingly so.

The elevator is decorated inside too, with sprigs of holly and impressively realistic icicles hanging from the ceiling, the leaves and ice glistening in the glow of the neat row of fairy lights delicately twinkling around the tops of the walls in time with the acoustic Christmas songs playing quietly from a speaker David never manages to locate.

Unexpectedly, the elevator doesn’t just play music; it speaks too.

He finds that one out when a women’s voice with an Irish accent greets them from nowhere and startles him enough that he nearly drops the bottle of scotch May’s insisted on bringing as a gift.

Of course, Peter replies to the voice and wishes it a Merry Christmas like it’s the most casual thing in the world.

And David would have thought that odd if Peter hadn’t been a part of his life for just over a year now, but then he realises it is odd, very odd, because it becomes immediately apparent that the elevator lady isn’t just an automated greeting like he’d thought.

She thanks Peter for his Christmas wishes in her lilting accent, and then asks him how he’s doing, and then tells May she looks nice in the blue dress David’s been admiring all evening and should have complimented her on sooner because now he’s been beaten to the post by Irish Siri. After she’s done chatting with Peter and complimenting May and greeting an awestruck Ned and a straight faced Michelle, David gets a wish that he enjoy the party, but something about the tone of the elevator lady’s voice as she says it makes it seem like he isn’t quite as welcome as the others.

If David thought the foyer and the elevator were impressive, he realises they’re nothing when he steps through the sliding glass doors into the frosty white penthouse of the Tower.

It’s snowing inside, literally snowing, with tiny, perfectly formed flakes falling from somewhere above them and disappearing seconds after they land. They’re too warm, too perfect to be real, but the trees dotted around, all covered in snow and lights and glistening glass decorations, fill the air with a sweet earthy smell of pine too fresh to be fake.

The pine mixes with the cinnamon and nutmeg of the mulled wine and the ginger of the beautifully detailed tiny houses sat around the room, leaving the apartment warm and cosy and homely despite the size and grandeur. It’s helped by the fire pits, probably fake judging by how the smoke vanishes into the air, the glow of their flames lighting the place in tones of flickering red and orange.

Ned stops so abruptly in the doorway at the sight of it that David walks right into him, and even Michelle, who David’s sure disagrees with the commercialisation of such religious events, looks impressed.

“Wow, it’s beautiful,” marvels May from beside him, slipping a hand into his. David doesn’t really want to agree but he thinks he’s going to have to.

“Oh, welcome!” a voice saves him, and when he looks round, he finds Mrs Stark heading through the crowds of guests with a smile on her lips and snow caught in her elegantly coiled hair. There’s more of it on her dress, he thinks, the silver thread tastefully woven into her navy gown subtly reminiscent of the flakes falling from her ceiling.

“How lovely to see you all,” she says as she approaches. “And David how nice to finally meet you, we’ve heard so much from Peter.”

Tony Stark, who pushes through the crowd behind her with his shirt sleeves rolled up in the warmth to reveal a tanned left arm and a Frozen themed flurry swirling on his prosthetic right one David’s sure is courtesy of the beaming girl who barrels excitedly into Peter with enough force that he stumbles, looks less like he thinks it’s nice.

While Mrs Stark (“Call me Pepper”) takes May and David to get drinks, Morgan, and in turn Tony, take the kids on a tour. She’s chattering excitedly as weaves her little body through the crowds, pulling Peter with her by the hand and making sure they all inspect each glowing, frosty tree and tiny moving reindeer she points out.

The conversation with Pepper drifts from how May’s doing to David’s job to their upcoming anniversary, and then by the time they’ve moved on to talk about how Morgan’s first year of school is going, David realises Tony is no longer with Peter and his friends, but standing leaning against the far wall with a stony expression and a glass of something amber in hand as he talks to a darker skinned, short haired man David eventually recognises to be War Machine. Or maybe the man inside War Machine, since his name isn’t War Machine any more than Tony Stark’s is Iron Man.

Or maybe it is. David isn’t really sure how that works, he just knows the man prefers War Machine to Iron Patriot, Peter’s told him so before.

He’s sure War Machine doesn’t find whatever Tony is looking quite so irritated by as serious as he does, though. Judging by the teasing grin his wearing as he nudges the grumpy man with his shoulder, he thinks the whole situation, whatever it may be, is actually kind of funny. David tries not to laugh at the sour expression Tony gives him as he downs his drink, and then turns away when a glare as frosty as his arm was when they arrived gets sent his way. Not that’s he’s entirely surprised by that.

Tony doesn’t like him.

Is _jealous_ of him according to May.

What does surprises him though, is that Tony’s daughter isn’t with him anymore either, and when he scans the room, he finds she’s still with Peter, now perched comfortably on his hip for added height while he talks animatedly with, oh, okay, wow, that’s Thor. Thor who, as he watches, gives Peter a playful shove he impressively holds his ground against even with an excited six year old hanging off his neck.

David guesses Thor wasn’t even trying. He’s sure the man could have knocked Peter from the room if he’d wanted to. 

Besides Ned and Michelle, the only other member of the group Peter’s in he can name for sure is Bruce Banner, who’s standing a little to the side and sipping at a drink and looking just a little overwhelmed by the party. The rest must be avengers too, but they’re either not quite so easily recognisable without their costumes on or are new enough he doesn’t know their names.

Captain America, who he thinks he can eventually pick out on hair colour alone, looks like any other well presented guy when he’s not dressed in patriotic red and blue and holding a strikingly unmistakable shield, but David wouldn’t be able to mistake the pinkish lady with big black eyes antenna or the green lady or the talking racoon or the literal moving tree who’s hunched over a dated looking handheld games console like he doesn’t want to be there for anyone else even on his worst day.

May catches him staring eventually and pats his arm in a consoling sort of way and tells him he’ll get used to it.

David definitely disagrees with her this time.

Despite his excitement, Ned’s awestruck enough he’s looking almost as overwhelmed as David feels, his eyes flicking between the avengers and the aliens and Peter like he can’t quite cope with having so many of his heroes in one place and is seeking out his friend as confirmation he’s not dreaming every few seconds. It’s a shame Spider-Man isn’t there really, since the kid practically idolises the guy, but then he decides that’s probably for the best because Ned looks one step away from his brain shorting out with the excitement of it all as it is.

Michelle, in true Michelle fashion, seems to be resolutely taking it all in her stride. Surveying the scene with a collected coolness most people could only wish for as she takes a turn to hold Morgan and talks to one of the two red-headed women. The girl in her arms keeps prodding her and whining as she reaches out for Peter, but Michelle’s definitely doing the right thing by not passing her over because Peter’s the most animated David’s ever seen him, bouncing excitedly on his toes as he babbles at a hundred miles an hour about something to do with space and iron spiders to a man David’s sure is parenting the tree and very clearly having the time of his life.

Hopefully the kid’s giddy just on the atmosphere rather than whatever’s in his glass, but David begins to doubt that when the man beside him, the one with the arrows, he thinks, takes his glass, sniffs it, then pours it into a nearby plant pot.

The bowl of fruit punch gets replaced soon afterwards.

After the buffet, a hammer appears in the middle of the room, and it must have been Thor who put it there because no one else seems to be able to lift it. Only one of the other Avengers can so much as make it wobble, but he’s sure they all already knew that before the game even started.

Ned wide eyed with excitement, tries too, and then Michelle, and Morgan, and a couple of the other guests, and then David has a go out of curiosity and he might as well be trying to pick up the earth itself for all the effect he has.

“You have to be worthy!” booms Thor when he asks, and then picks it up, sends it spinning through the air briefly like it’s a twirling baton, and then puts it back down on the floor.

The attempts get more interesting. One of the red-headed women tries using a strange red light that glows from her hands, the tree, whose name is Groot, he keeps saying so, tries growing whilst holding it, and Ned pulls with the old ironman glove he gets offered. Eventually, Tony, rolling his eyes, gains a whole ironman suit from seemingly nowhere and then more to make a point than anything else, grabs hold and tries to blast his suit towards the ceiling.

Fake snow scatters and the trees sway but the hammer stays exactly where Thor so casually left it. He puts an arm around Peter when he returns shrugging theatrically to the crowd, and then mutters something into the kid’s ear he flushes and shakes his head at. He gives in eventually, steps forward and unenthusiastically pulls at the intricately decorated stem.

The hammer tilts at his half-hearted attempt, rocks a little on its base, and Peter freezes instantly, his mouth falling a little open. He blinks in surprise, glances up at the suddenly hushed crowd at the call of “Go, Webs,” and then turns, seeking out Tony from the crowd. Their eyes catch, wide brown holding Tony’s under his raised brow as though asking for his permission, or maybe his approval, but then, when he swallows and looks back down and tries to lift the hammer again with his soft brown eyes wide as saucers, nothing happens.

The gathering deflates and Peter’s expression falls.

Thor booms a laugh and says, “Good try, young warrior,” but he still looks surprised and a little impressed by Peter’s attempt.

David finds he isn’t; if anyone had a good enough soul to be worthy, he’s sure it would be Peter. 

Morgan starts flagging soon afterwards but downright refuses to leave the party and go to bed despite Pepper’s best efforts. She’s willing to be held for a bit, at first mollified by her dad and his colour changing arm, then by Pepper when she tires of his games, then by May, until she struggles to be put down again and wanders back over to Peter.

It’s Michelle’s lap she ends up curled up on, her head on the girl’s collarbone and her eyes heavy lidded whilst Michelle rolls hers at the roaring game of what looks to be cards against humanity someone has started on the coffee table. She sits so still and so quiet despite the rowdy game and Peter’s excited bouncing as he sits beside Michelle that David’s almost certain she’s asleep, until, right in the middle of his conversation with Helen Cho, she sits up with a start and points to the window with a saliva covered forefinger and shouts “Real snow!” loudly enough Tony startles and looks about to rush to her aid.

When he turns to the window, David realises she’s right.

The snow is heavier than he thought it would be, and within minutes, there’s a perfect layer of undisturbed, glistening white settled over the glossy black surface of the roof terrace.

The snow doesn’t stay perfect for long.

David missed who suggested the snowball fight, was too buy watching the snow, but most of the teenagers and wannabe teenagers have clearly accepted the challenge as within minutes the helipad turned battleground turned rooftop garden of Stark Tower is a warzone filled with Avengers once again.

The snowball fight isn’t teamed, it’s just three human teenagers, a handful of superheroes, four space people, a racoon, a tree, and Tony Stark and his daughter pelting each other with snow against a backdrop of glistening frozen flakes and bright city lights.

Laughter and shrieks of cold and whoops of victory and the occasional bang of a snowball hitting something it shouldn’t echo in through the glass, and David finds himself watching but struggling to keep up with the fast paced action outside. Snow flies and bodies run and slip and fall and tackle and in the midst of it all, the large, pink skinned, bare chested man makes snow angels on the floor.

The numbers dwindle quickly, not everyone is quite as much a teenager as the actual teenagers, and not everyone likes the cold, and soon it’s just Peter, Michelle, Morgan, Tony, and a handful of the Avengers left outside and a slightly increased crowd watching them at the window. 

May laughs as Peter hits Michelle dead on the nose, baulks at his own apparently unintentional good aim, and then promptly gets tackled to the ground and a face-full of snow himself for his troubles. Tony laughs too, says something loud and teasing that doesn’t quite make it audibly through the glass, and then probably regrets it when a well-timed leap from Peter manages to simultaneously drop snow down the back of his shirt and drag him down too in one fowl swoop.

Morgan cheers in delight, jumping up and down and egging Peter on as her dad tries to stick a handful of revenge snow down his back, and then leaping into the bundle to help when he succeeds. The reflectors on her blue snowsuit flash in the floodlights as the trio wrestle.

David never, ever thought he would get to see Tony Stark, waistcoat and all, laughing as he rolls in the snow, with not one, but two kids pinning him down, but here he is.

The kids win the fight, or maybe Tony lets them, lets a shivering Morgan have the last victory before he brings her in and bundles her up in a blanket. He looks like he could do with a blanket too, or a rest given the way his breathing’s heaving, but he shakes off Pepper’s concern just like David thinks Peter might have Tony’s just before he came in.

The kid gets cold, a side effect of his insane metabolism, maybe, and of course Tony is aware of that too.

David’s attention is drawn back to the fight by a victorious yell from Peter, and he turns back to the window just in time to see a snow-caked Captain America tackling Peter with enough force to send them rolling across the terrace.

For a second, David’s terrifyingly aware of just how fragile Peter is in comparison, but then he realises Peter’s doing a pretty good job of holding his own.

He isn’t sure how, but he is.

David’s almost impressed.

Twenty minutes and a more structured snowball fight later, they come in drenched and cold, carting enough melting snow in with them to turn the dark marble floor into a slushy slip hazard. The soggy coats of anyone that bothered to wear one get discarded on the back of a white leather sofa much too expensive for the job.

All except by Peter who’s still huddled in his, hugging the damp cloth to his shivering frame.

He looks frozen, the poor kid.

Michelle puts her arm on his to get his attention and says something he shakes his head to, smiling what he must hope is reassuringly as he pretends not to be shaking so violently his teeth would be chattering if his jaw wasn’t clenched so visibly tight. He looks tired too, suddenly worn, and then stumbles a little when he tries to take a step towards Ned. 

David’s about to go over, and he hears May mutter “Oh, Peter,” beside him, but then he’s stopped before he finds the courage to intervene by her hand on her arm.

“It’s okay, they’ve got it covered,” May says, and as he watches, Bruce puts an arm around the shuddering kid’s shoulders, asks Peter something he resignedly nods in response to, and then takes off his sweater and hands it to the kid.

Peter uncoordinatedly shrugs off his wet coat, then pulls the offered sweater on gratefully over the top of his own. Laughing a little, he puts on Captain America’s, then War Machine’s, and then Thor’s too when they’re offered until he’s bundled up in so many sweaters and jackets he looks like the Michelin man.

At least he’s less likely to end up hypothermic.

The similarity between Peter and the cartoon tyre-man hasn’t been missed by the arrow shooting Avenger either, and another one David doesn’t recognise makes a comment about being careful not to accidentally put him on a stick and roast him with the marshmallows as they take him across to a firepit under the guise of making Smores.

Peter laughs, unphased by the teasing and entirely unintimidated despite who it’s by, and then quips that he really wouldn’t mind a quick warm up in the fire because “it looks toasty in there,” through his chattering teeth.

The fire, being beside it, not in it, and the sweaters and jackets are helping though, and he’s starting to look a little better already. He’s still hugging himself, and his movements are still sluggish and a little stiff with cold when he reaches out for a fork, but he’s less pale and shaky already.

David’s known Peter’s awful at managing in the cold for a couple of months now, and he knows May and Tony and the kid’s friends have known even longer than he has, but it seems the Avengers, as busy as they are saving the world, have spent enough time with Peter to know that too.

It seems they’ve spent enough time with him to know how to warm him up without coddling as well, and are close enough for him to accept their help without too much embarrassment. They’ve warmed him up with amusing numbers of body-heat warmed sweaters and jackets and a light-hearted marshmallow roasting session over a firepit which David’s still sure must be fake.

Although he’s pleased Peter’s warmer now, David thinks he should be jealous as the kid makes Smores with the Avengers, worried that he’s being out-parented by literal gods and heroes, but then he realises he isn’t.

Not at all.

Because, it turns out the Avengers aren’t actually parenting him. They don’t treat him like their kid. They treat him almost like he’s one of them. Like an equal.

An equal they share their jackets with and warm up at the fireside and confiscate spiked punch from, sure, but still an equal.

He’s one of the team. A social setting only Avenger.

David frowns at them laughing around the fireplace with Ned and Michelle, and then shakes the confusion away.

By this stage, he’s just beginning to accept that nothing involving Peter makes sense, and he isn’t sure he’s ever going to figure out why. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come shout at me on tumblr, I'm [tumblr](https://bumblie-bee.tumblr.com)


	6. The Explanation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, if anyone would like some lighthearted hurt/comforty irondad, I posted [To Make a House a Home](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29112483) earlier today. 
> 
> Secondly, I'm sorry in advance. 
> 
> Love you all.

There had once been a time, a time before the battle of New York, when seeing superheroes fighting unimaginable beings on the streets would have felt impossible.

It would have been like a dream or a movie, something that just didn’t happen in real life, something that couldn’t possibly happen, but then times changed and suddenly it wasn’t.

It started with the attack at the Stark Expo, an event Tony Stark saved eight year old Peter at, according to May, and then there was the Battle of New York with its monsters in the sky, and then the robot war in a country in eastern Europe David can’t quite remember the name of, and then there was the blip.

Afterwards, came monsters made of fire and earth and air and hero to fight them who turned out to be a clearly insane man in a costume, and then there were more aliens and more madmen, and then, by that point, although the reports of attacks and invasions still weren’t that frequent, they had become almost the norm. It became like seeing an earthquake, or a bombing, an event that shocked the world, devastated local lives, but still something that could happen. Something that did happen. And something that occasionally happened frighteningly close to home.

Now is one of those times, and not just because the fight between the Avengers and a man who looks like he could once have been human is happening in New York city, but because it’s happening right in front of him.

Literally.

It wasn’t initially, was further downtown to start with, but the thing is giant, metal clad, cyborgs with claw wielding backpacks and superheroes can move a fight much quicker than the people trying to get away from it can flee, and now a limping, badly retired Iron Man and the lady who moves things with just glowing red light and her hands are battling a hoard of robot dogs just across the street from him and Spider-Man is swinging overhead yelling something David can’t quite make out from inside the building he and four others are sheltering within.

Part of him wants to just make a break for it and run, and part of him wants to be brave and help, and part of him just wants to text May and make sure she knows he loved her if all this goes badly but he can’t because the cell signal is down and his hands are shaking much too much to type a message even if it wasn’t.

An explosion echoes from outside, rattling the windows and clattering the glasses lining the shelf behind the counter of the small café, and the lady beside him clamps a hand over her mouth to muffle the tiny panicked cry she can’t seem to stop bubbling from her lips. David takes her free hand, holds it tight as the explosions and crashes and yells get closer, squeezes as one echoes from so close by the cutlery clatters on the table above them, and then uses it to pull her even deeper into their hiding spot when a deafening, furious roar echoes from just over their heads.

There’s shouting, more roaring, and then an almighty crash as the roof and far wall of the café cave in.

The woman screams, and honestly, David doesn’t blame her. 

They scoot back in panic as the thing, David’s sure it’s too far gone from human to be called ‘he’ anymore, falls through the hole, bringing with it bricks and rooftiles and strewing decimated chairs and tables and unidentifiable pieces of wood over the floor. The booth beside theirs splinters beneath the weight of a claw as it lands, and another other scratches at the floor mere inches from where they’re sitting.

David thinks he would probably regret not running sooner if he had any ounce of brainpower left over to do so because it’s sure as hell too late do it now.

The thing, whatever it is, roars in anger as it scrabbles at the floor with its metal claws, struggling for purchase and trying to right itself as War Machine and the man with the wings follow it through the hole, blasting it over and over to hold it down. The claws flail, scattering chairs and tables like bowling pins, ripping the serving counter from the tiles, and David only just manages to turn away before one catches the man with the wings and catapults him through the shop front in a shower of shattered glass. 

“Sam!” War Machine yells as the winged figure disappears from view behind the opaque rain of fragmented window, but it seems Sam is fine, or at least not too badly hurt, because he’s back on his feet seconds later and launching himself into the sky.

David loses him after that, he can’t see much of what’s going on above from his hiding spot, so for a while all he gets is a view of the thing struggling to its feet in the sporadic fiery glow of War Machine’s ineffective blasting. The claws flail angrily as the thing roars and tables and chairs and fragments of both clatter as they’re knocked about.

Repulsors roar, and then through the chaos, someone yells, “Webs, get your ass in here pronto!”

It would almost be comical that Spider-Man, when he arrives, enters through the door and sets the bell above merrily ringing amidst the yelling and screeching and scratching of claws against tiles if the situation wasn’t so dire.

“Huh, I guess this dude isn’t any more a fan of coffee than he is of reading,” Spider-Man quips casually over the ruckus as he runs forwards, and then, with a soft ‘thwip’, what little of the red and black costume David can see from under the table vanishes towards the ceiling. One of the claws follows, snapping furiously, and when it next comes down again to scrabble at the floor again, it’s covered in web, clamped shut.

David only just catches sight of the culprit being dragged along behind it before he’s up on the remains of the ceiling once more.

There’s more yelling and another furious roar. The blasts of War Machine’s guns that may as well be firing Nerf bullets for all the damage they’re doing continue overhead. A second later, there’s a table-shaking bang and a small explosion David thinks is owed to the flying guy, and then a cry of victory.

When David risks bending down to get a look, he finds Spider-Man’s no longer skidding along the floor on his heels as the claw he’s webbed drags him about, but tethered to the far wall by his other hand. Even with the mask shielding his expression, David can see he’s half grinning triumphantly, half grimacing with the strain.

“Hey, you guys under the tables,” he yells over the roaring and the blasting, his wide white eyepieces still fixed on the thing as it wrestles in his grip. “I’m holding it, go!”

David hadn’t even realised Spider-Man was aware they were there, hadn’t noticed him looking, didn’t think he’d have even been able to see them from the angle, but neither he nor any other of the sheltering civilians needs to be told twice.

They just about make it out the door before Spider-Man’s web gives way with a snap.

Outside, the street is ruined. Buildings have been brought to the ground and cars upturned. The tarmac is patchy and cratered, and as they run quite literally for their lives, another explosion David thinks comes from one of the robot dogs Iron Man and the glowing lady are still battling in the distance takes the roof off a building to their left.

There’s an echoing crash from behind followed by a roar and then the sound of bricks crumbling over the continued panicked yells. Another explosion follows, and then there’s a creaking sort of groan David only realises comes from a tortured street-lamp when the bent piece of metal sails past him and takes out a shop front on the other side of the road.

David doesn’t know what’s happened for sure, doesn’t want to waste the time looking back, but by the sound of it the thing has left its temporary coffee-scented prison and returned the fight to the street.

Terrified and knowing there’s nothing he can do to help the situation, he doesn’t stop.

He runs as fast as he can from the roars and yells and blasts that follow, pulls the woman whose hand is still in his along with him simply because he had the good fortune with being born with legs long enough for running even though he doesn’t use them and she doesn’t deserve to be left behind. He doesn’t look back even when there’s a yelp and a scream he knows can’t mean anything good, and then takes the poor woman to the floor with him just in time for a sudden flash of red and black to fly over their heads with enough speed to blur and enough momentum to take down the wall of the building next to them as it hits.

Bricks and mortar crumble, glass shatters and the steel frame of the building groans in protest as a good portion of its support is lost.

When the rubble stills enough that David dares to pick himself back up, he finds the front wall of the building reduced to fractured glass and scattered bricks and a groaning Spider-Man sprawled haphazardly amongst the rubble. One of his red-gloved hands is held to his head as he moans, and the eyepieces of his suit are squinted and uneven.

David didn’t realise the mask could move like that, didn’t realise it could so accurately display the expression of whoever is beneath.

Didn’t realise it could display emotion.

It can though, and David gets a good display of that when, in answer to his call, Spider-Man’s head shoots up and the half-lidded eyes of the suit widen into an expression of pure alarm. Before he’s even begun to question that, or if the person inside the costume is okay, Spider-Man is stumbling to his feet and the kid, because it is a kid’s voice, high and terrified beneath the mask, is yelling frantically at him to go over the boom of another explosion. 

David’s pulling the woman along with him again before he’s had time to even notice how familiar that kid’s voice is.

He ends up back home.

Which, well, it isn’t really where he wants to be. He wants to help. There are the wounded to treat and the lost to reunite and the stranded to return home, but apparently the police don’t want any more people on the streets than is necessary. More people mean more injuries, more deaths, and that’s all they’re trying to prevent at this point.

He’d have gone to the hospital instead, shelter there where he could at least be helpful, but it’s in the other direction to the one he ran in and now on the other side of a police cordon and David’s pretty sure it would be impossible for him to even if it wasn’t.

Everything’s already chaos as it is. The subway’s stopped, the roads clogged or closed, and the police and army keeping any pedestrian who even dare venture nearby well away from the action.

Or where the action was really, because although the news is only just starting to report anything more than repeated instruction to flee the affected areas, it has told him that the fighting is over and the Avengers have won.

Not that he could have figured that out for himself going on the sudden lack of explosions and roaring alone, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

What would also be nice to have confirmed, is that May, who he thinks was shopping, and Peter, who he knows was at Ned’s, are okay, but while the TV networks are still rolling, showing clips closer and closer to where the action was and starting to overlay the audio of the reports over poor quality clips filmed by fleeing members of the public, the internet is down and the cell networks are so clogged David can’t get a text to send or a call to connect.

It leaves him sitting on the sofa, his useless cell phone in hand and chest clenched anxiously as he watches the news he was briefly a part of unfurl.

It feels unreal, wrong, mixes badly with the worry and concern for his family already laying heavy in his gut.

The battle with the figure who once upon a time could have been human looks worse on the telly than it had in real life. It’s less terrifying on the TV, sure, he isn’t actually there now, but at least when he had seen it before, the thing had been more or less pinned to the ground with repulsor blasts and the flying man’s bullets.

In the clips, it isn’t.

It’s fighting full strength in the street.

The clips give David a better look at what it actually was too, a blurry, jolty view as the amateur cameramen ran for their life, but a view that isn’t blocked by a table and obscured by flailing claws and flying furniture all the same.

Beneath the dusty, battle-worn helmet, the face of the thing is human, larger than normal and grotesquely twisted in fury but undeniably once human, but its torso and limbs are exaggeratedly enlarged and muscular enough to throw his proportions entirely away from that of a person. Even without his armour and weapons and the claws protruding from the metal on his back, he’s stronger than a person could ever be too, throwing cars with his hands and crushing buildings with ease and flinging avengers from the ground and sky alike as though they’re ragdolls.

The Avengers had been struggling, that much had been abundantly clear even from his hiding place beneath the table, but the full scale fight on the telly makes it even more obvious.

There are clips of the avengers fighting over-narrated by the reporter, clips of Thor hitting the thing with his hammer and doing as much damage as he would have with a duster, of War Machine blasting ineffectively as the thing roars and civilians run from thrown cars, of Iron Man getting hit by one in their place, of the woman with glowing hands struggling to hold it back as flails furiously.

The report has just switched to a clip of Spider-Man, the black of his suit grey with brick dust, landing a web swing right on the thing’s back and making a futile grasp at the underside of his claw-armed armour when there’s the sound of a key in the lock.

David’s on his feet before the door even opens. 

“May, thank god,” he breathes, rushing to draw her into a tight hug as she hurries into the apartment. The shopping somehow still in her hands drops to the floor and her arms tighten around him in return, but she looks troubled and understandably worried as she asks, “Is Peter home yet? I can’t get hold of him.”

David pulls back, frowning. “He’s at Ned’s isn’t he? He’s safe?”

It turns out Peter isn’t at Ned’s, and he isn’t safe like David thought he was. He finds that out twenty minutes later as he and an anxious, distracted May sit on the sofa, their hands entwined as they watch the grim news roll. The reporters have made it to where the action took place now, and David can just about see the ruined remains of the café he’d been hiding in in the background of the report.

Its humbling, terrifying to see the crumbled debris he could have been crushed under had Spider-Man not noticed he and the four others were hiding where they were.

Maybe that’s why it hurts so much to know that Spider-Man didn’t make it out of the fight quite as well as he did. Maybe it’s because he now knows beneath that mask, he’s just a kid.

Either way, the hero’s down, has been since before the end of the fight if the blonde haired, grim faced reporter making her way through the derelict street is right, was snatched off the back of the thing by a claw as he was trying to disable his armour and ended up being thrown against the building he’s still laying in the rubble of a short while later.

He’s saved the day, apparently, noticed the weakness, went in to take advantage of his find, and ended up paying the price. It had been War Machine who pulled with wire Spider-Man had found in the end, the men with the wings and arrows who distracted him, the lady with the glowing hands and Captain America who took him down.

Iron Man hadn’t helped.

Iron Man had been with Spider-Man.

Spider-Man who according the reporter, is still unresponsive.

It’s as they’re watching the too still, medic surrounded figure of Spider-Man getting loaded into a waiting air ambulance with Iron Man at his side that May’s phone rings in her hand.

She startles, jumps out of the wide eyed, anxious trance she’d been watching the tv in, and holds it up to her ear with a shaking hand.

“Tony,” she answers with, because of course Tony Stark would be able to get a call to go through even with the entirely of the cell network in complete disarray, “Tony, is he okay?” 

David’s heart is throbbing in his throat, was before May even asked that question because he knows there would only be one reason that Tony would be ringing May now, definitely is when May breathes out a tremulous ‘Oh, god,’ and then says they’re on their way. 

He doesn’t know how Tony knew something was up with Peter, David’s just seen him on the tv and it’s apparently live, and he doesn’t understand why Peter is being taken not to a hospital, but to the Avenger’s Compound upstate either, but he’s much to worried about his kid to care about either of those things now.

The traffic is a nightmare in the city. It’s always bad, there’s always congestion, and the rubble and the military and police and ambulances and rescue operations are making it all a thousand times worse.

David wishes with all his heart that it wasn’t, wishes he could get May to Peter’s side right now.

He wishes even more than that that their journey wasn’t necessary at all.

By the time they’ve made it over the bridges and out into the not so overcrowded freeway, Tony’s phoned to tell them Peter’s been rushed into surgery.

Tony keeps them up to date as they drive, his voice terrified and raw as it grates through the hands free speakers in David’s car, so when they make it to the compound and Pepper takes them up from the reception to the Medbay, they’re already aware that Peter still won’t be there.

He’s still in the operating theatre, where the best trauma and orthopaedic surgeons Tony can get his sticky, billionaire hands on are working on reassembling a terrifying number of broken ribs. They’ve already repaired a punctured lung and patched his liver and shocked his heart back into a sensible rhythm when the lack of blood in his circulatory system sent it into distress, and they still have more to do.

Still have his sternum to wire back together.

Three vertebrae from the lumbar region of his spine to repair.

May goes sheet white when she finds out.

David feels sick.

He thinks Tony does too when he sees him sitting in a chair in what looks to be a pop-up waiting room, a brace on his wrist and his head in his hands. Beneath the bruising and the ridiculously well-tamed goatee, he’s the palest David has ever seen him, and when he looks up, David finds a haunted sort of look in his eyes.

David isn’t surprised, Tony’s been with Peter since he was brought in, had seen him broken and bleeding and in pain. He’d been in a battle to save New York before that, and had sat with Spider-Man as he’d waited for an ambulance to take him away for his own treatment in the middle.

David absentmindedly wonders if Spider-Man is here too, if he’s doing any better than Peter is, but then May gasps out a sob and his attention in firmly back on her

“You said you’d keep him safe, Tony,” May cries furiously, her voice catching wetly in her throat and her eyes glistening, “You said you’d-”

The rest of her sentence is lost against Tony’s shoulder as he pulls her into a hug. His shirt, the dusty black long-sleeved thermal he’d been wearing under his Iron Man suit, muffles her sobs as her heart breaks. It soaks her tears.

“I know, May,” Tony agrees brokenly, rubbing her back and looking fractions of a hair’s width away from crying himself, “I know I did, and I failed him.”

The chairs are soft. Comfortable. Nothing like those in the waiting rooms in the hospital.

They’re nothing like the brittle atmosphere either.

May sits by his hide, her hand in his, her leg restlessly twitching in a way so akin to Peter’s it almost hurts to see. Behind her glasses, her eyes are red and shiny, her mascara smudged over skin much paler than David has ever seen it.

Tony sits across the room, his head in his hands again and his elbows on his knees and an expression, haunted and terrified and heartbreakingly guilty, playing on his bruised face.

David would wonder what exactly that could mean if he was able think of anything other than Peter and the theatre he’s in just down the hall.

As the evening wears on, the room fills.

Pepper arrives, having finally settled Morgan for the night.

A grim-faced man named Happy takes the seat across from May.

Captain America turns up, worried but perfectly presented as always.

Thor enters without so much as his usual boomed ‘hello.

Eventually, nearly all the Avengers have trickled in.

They sit in silence, waiting and worried.

David doesn’t know if they’re all there for Peter or for Spider-Man.

He doesn’t ask.

Morning dawns, and with it comes hope.

A scrub nurse turns up just as the rising sun is burning the lake outside the window a vivid orange, and he stands in the doorway looking exhausted and pale, but not like anything catastrophic has happened.

David takes it as a good sign.

It’s an even better sign when the nurse reports to them that Peter’s being transferred to a room and that Doctor Cho will be out to speak to them soon.

The news Doctor Cho brings is mixed.

Peter’s made it through surgery, is now settled in a room just down the hall, but he’s still heavily sedated and reliant on a ventilator and is far from being considered stable.

“He lost a lot of blood,” Doctor Cho reports, her eyes dark-ringed and sad, “both before and during surgery, and it put a great deal of strain on his heart. His oxygen saturations were already low from the injuries to his lung, and although I am hopeful it hasn’t, I cannot be sure that the interruptions of the blood flow to his brain haven’t caused any further damage. There is already some swelling there as a result of the… the initial trauma, some bruising, but we are currently managing the increased pressure medicinally and I am hopeful he will not need more invasive intervention.”

“But you’re saying there’s a risk he has permanent damage?” David asks quietly. He knows what she’s saying, has been in the medical profession far too long to not read between the lines, and he thinks May and Tony must have known what she’d been implying too.

Maybe they’re just been too scared to ask for confirmation.

Cho nods. Her expression stays set behind her professional mask, but her eyes convey a pain and worry she can’t quite hide. “I am hopefully there won’t be, but yes, you’re right, I cannot promise you that is not a possibility.”

“What about his spine?” That comes from Tony. His words are rough and grating and sending ice cold shivers down David’s own back. “He said he couldn’t feel his legs.”

Cho grimaces slightly, nods a little. “His vertebrae have been repaired, stabilised, as have his ribs and sternum, but unfortunately, the fractures were significant and displaced and there had been some trauma to his spinal cord before he was brought in. It hasn’t been severed completely so the damage may repair over time, but there is damage, and that is was what caused the loss of sensation he experienced prior to surgery.”

“He’s not… not… he will be able to walk again, right?” May asks, her voice small and terrified. She’s trying to put on a brave face, maintain her composure, but her breathing is heavy enough David can hear each trembling, short, sharp inhale in the quiet of the room. Through their linked hands, he can feel just how much she’s shaking, too, can tell just how stressed and anxious and upset she is by the tightness of her grip.

Cho looks at her sadly, looks at them all apologetically like she wishes she could give them better news than what she has to offer.

“I’m sorry but cannot tell you for sure how he will be when he wakes up. It’s impossible to accurately predict how much he will recover, but as the bruising and swelling heal, there is a good chance that he will regain at least some of the sensation he lost. We will know more for sure when he wakes.”

May nods, lets out a shaky, broken exhale, and Tony rubs his bruised hand over his face. He doesn’t look like he’s about to cry, but he doesn’t look like he’s far off either. 

David realises it’s the first time they’ve had anything in common.

It’s something they all do.

David, May, Tony, Pepper, Happy, the Avengers lining the walls. Even Cho, who suddenly shakes her head and removes her scrub cap with a heavy exhale. It deflates her, lets her shoulders sag, and when she looks up again, her professional façade has cracked. 

“I am truly sorry I cannot give you the news we all want to hear,” she admits, looking between May and Tony with heavy eyes. “Peter does not deserve this, and I wish I could have done more to help him but there is only so much medicine can do. He was very badly hurt, is in a very serious condition. He’s not yet stable, and assuming he does pull through, his road to recover will be an easy trek, but he is also-” she pauses, glances up at David- “he is also Peter. He is strong, and I think if anyone has a chance of recovering from this it is him.”

May nods, sniffles a little, and then gives Cho a watery, thankful smile.

She’s done her best, even if they still don’t know that the best of the best is going to be good enough to save the teenager they all just want to be okay.

For the thirty years since he passed his degree, David has worked in the PICU of New York Presbyterian, so it isn’t as though he hasn’t seen teenagers and children as critically ill as Peter is, but he supposes it must be different when it’s your own kid lying unconscious in a bed with his skin whiter than the stark sheets he’s on and his too still form dwarfed by wires and tubes and beeping machines.

Sometimes, they tell the parents their child looks like they’re sleeping before they let them in to the ward. It’s a way of warning them, comforting them, but it’s rarely true.

Children don’t ever sleep in a way as unnaturally still as they do when they’re sedated, and they certainly don’t normally sleep with ventilation tubes and numerous IV ports and monitor wires trailing out from underneath their hospital gowns.

It isn’t true in Peter’s case either.

Peter’s flat on his back, not sprawled in that haphazard, teenage fashion he favours when he dozes on the sofa, and his expression is blank in a way that doesn’t look peaceful. His eyes are too still behind papery lids and his dry lips are slack, parted just slightly to allow for the tube that forces his chest to rise and fall in regular, mechanical intervals.

The room is silent for a second, just the beeping of the hear monitor and the hiss-click, hiss-click of the ventilator and a sucking, gurgling sound David eventually realises is coming from a chest drainage tube, and then May lets out a shuddering, sob of a sigh.

“Oh, baby.”

Her words come out hoarse and broken, shaking just like her hands as she reaches out to brush the hair back from her boy’s bruised forehead with one and takes hold of his limp one with the other. His fingers don’t grasp hers back, and he doesn’t so much as twitch when she gives it a squeeze and tells him she’s there.

David wasn’t expecting him to, but it hurts all the same when he doesn’t.

There are three chairs beside Peter’s bed, and David doesn’t think it’s a coincidence. May takes the one on Peter’s right, scoots it as close to the bed as it’ll go so she can keep her thumb running soothingly over the back of her kid’s bruised, split knuckles as she waits. She looks exhausted, both emotionally and physically, and her expression has taken on a broken, haunted look beneath a façade of composure that fractures just a little more with every skipped beat of Peter’s heart.

It hurts David to see her so pained, just like it hurts him to see Peter sedated and ventilated, unable to even breathe for himself.

The chair on the left belongs to Tony, as does Peter’s other hand. The arrangement is awkward, uncomfortable looking, with Tony’s left hand holding Peter’s left as though they’re shaking hands, greeting one another at the weirdest business meeting of all time. It leave Tony sitting oddly in the chair, his back twisted unnaturally, and it doesn’t look like a pleasant angle for the man’s braced wrist to be at either, but it does allow Tony’s real hand to be the one holding Peter’s and David thinks that skin to skin contact makes the discomfort worthwhile.

Tony doesn’t look like he’d give a second thought about the suffering of a pulled wrist and an achy spine if he gets to comfort his kid anyway. Peter’s worth it, and David thinks Tony feels guilty enough about something he’d accept the pain even if he wasn’t.

David doesn’t get one of Peter’s hands; he only has the two, but he does get one of May’s. It stays tightly held in his as a reminder than she isn’t alone, that he’s there for Peter too, and he runs his thumb over the soft skin over her knuckles in a vain attempt to give her some sort of comfort.

It probably doesn’t help. He doubts there’s anything that could make her feel even slightly better until she knows Peter is going to be okay, but he’ll try all the same.

Time ticks by.

Dawn morphs to morning.

Lunch arrives and goes untouched.

They sit in silence, three pairs of burning eyes intently watching Peter’s too still, too pale form as the machines beside him whir and hiss and the heart monitor beeps a jarring, stuttered tune.

Eventually, it settles a little as Peter’s heart stops throwing quite so many beats, and soon after, the endless bags of ‘SM’ labelled blood hanging beside his bed stop being replaced when they empty.

At dinner time, Cho kicks them out, and then when night falls, she evicts them again with a stern message that they’ll be no good to Peter tetchy and sleep-deprived, and a softer promise that she’ll fetch them if anything at all changes.

May’s protests are in vain, David tries and fails to sway her too.

Even Tony’s threats of pay cuts and firing result in no more than an unimpressed raised brow and a pointed finger towards the door and a threat to bring in Pepper if he doesn’t leave.

In the morning, there is a change, and one for the better.

Peter’s heart has strengthened and steadied overnight, and his previously tanking blood pressure has stabilised, and when Cho starts to lighten his sedation, his battered lungs fight against the vent.

She sends them out again to wait in the corridor, and when they’re allowed back into the room, Peter’s face is obscured by an oxygen mask but his lips are closed, and for the first time in what feels like years, he’s breathing on his own.

May’s shaking again when she takes his hand, and her eyes look glossy with what David thinks are happy, exhausted, relieved tears.

They go unshed for a moment, and then Peter’s eyelids flutter open long enough for them to catch a glimpse of chocolate brown irises before he falls back asleep.

Peter opens his eyes twice more before lunch. Neither time they stay open for long, and neither time they manage to focus on anything in particular, but none of the medical staff seem overly concerned. He’s still fighting off the anaesthetic, has a head injury which probably isn’t helping, and more significantly, is drugged up to his eyeballs with the strongest analgesics they have for him.

Its making him drowsy, the young, male nurse from the night before tells them so when asked, but at least it means he doesn’t seem to be in any pain.

David knows that probably isn’t going to last.

By mid afternoon, Peter’s restless, more aware of his surroundings. He hums in response if they call his name loudly enough, sometimes squeezes their hands when they ask him to, and once he quietly slurs what David thinks might have been an apology to May into his pillow before his unfocused eyes droop closed again and he drifts back off.

He’s asleep more often than not, is lethargic and incoherent during his brief adventures into consciousness, and his movements are weak and uncoordinated like those of a newborn kitten, but he still somehow manages to bat his oxygen mask off often enough that Cho eventually relents and thoroughly tapes a nasal canula to his face in its place.

Not long after, he starts to scrunch his expression when he skirts the boundary sleep, and Cho ups the infusion rate of his pain meds. He groans on one occasion, the noise low and pained as his nose wrinkles in discomfort, but May for some reason ends up beaming.

“Look.”

David follows her pointed finger, is aware Tony is doing the same, and finds himself watching Peter’s legs curling feebly under the covers as he tries and fails to get himself comfortable.

He finds himself staring, collapses back in his chair as he lets out a shaky sigh of pure relief and Tony mutters, “thank fuck,” under his breath and rests his head in his hands.

It’s just before dinner when the quiet beeping of Peter’s heart monitor speeds again, and when David looks up, he finds Peter’s chocolate eyes are heavy-lidded but open, and actively tracking May as she gets to her feet. It’s the first time he’s done that, and David revels in another little victory.

“Hey, sweetheart, you with us this time?” she asks him gently, her hand bushing his hair back again and her thumb automatically soothing his brow.

Peter hums softly in confirmation, or maybe just contentment, and rolls his head into her hand. A heavy sigh escapes him, and his leaden eyelids flutter closed, and David’s sure he’s about to fall asleep again when he forces them back open. Squinting blearily up at May, he hums a little, licks his cracked lips, then croaks out her name so softly it’s little more than a slurred exhale.

The word catches in his dry throat, quickly descends into weak, wheezy cough, and his heavy eyes snap closed again as his face contorts into a grimace. His free hand twitches on the bed, his fingers grasping feebly at the sheet, and then, when the coughing has passed, he groans lowly, swallowing visibly in a vain attempt to sooth his dry throat.

“Here,” May offers as he coughs and grimaces again. Obediently, gratefully, he opens his mouth to accept the ice chip she presses against his lips.

A quiet, appreciative sigh escapes him as he sucks on it, lets it melt on his tongue and swallows down the small amount of soothing water it yields. When it’s gone, his leaden eyes open again, rolling briefly before the settle back on his aunt.

“May.” His voice comes out week as a breeze and horribly croaky from both disuse and the ventilation tube, but at least the words don’t catch in his rough throat and bring on another round coughing.

At least he’s awake, and talking, and able to recognise who he’s with.

May smiles, sniffles a little as she rubs her knuckles over his cheek.

“Yeah baby, it’s me,” she says, her voice cotton-candy soft and heartbreakingly tender and a little shaky with relief. “I’m here, and Tony’s here too, and David, we’re all here. And everyone else is downstairs. They’re all okay. Probably having dinner and eating Tony out of house and home.”

Peter’s brow furrows, the dressing taped to his temple wrinkling like maybe he didn’t quite comprehend all that, but he nods weakly all the same. He lets his eyes roam idly from May to David and back again, and then he looks to process a little more of what she’s said and rolls his head to the side.

“T’ny?”

Tony’s on his feet already. He gives Peter’s hand, still in his, a gentle squeeze.

“Hey buddy, I’m right here.” He pauses, waits for Peter’s eyes to focus and his features to relax. “You gotta stop scaring us like that, hey? I’ve got a heart condition you know.”

Peter grimaces sluggishly. “Mm, sorry.” He swallows, licks his dry lips, then, “d’we win?” he asks Tony, frowning so deeply in confusion his heavy eyes are almost closed. “D-we… I found the… found the thing.” 

The muddled, almost senseless words come out so mumbled and slurred they’re nearly unintelligible, their meaningless meaning almost lost, but a sad, pained smile forms on Tony’s lips at the nonsense all the same. It’s one David’s sure Peter’s too drugged to not take at a happy face value and one he himself doesn’t really understand, but before he can say anything, May’s already speaking.

“Peter, honey, David’s here too,” she says and Peter frowns, clearly confused. He blinks so heavily it’s a surprise his eyes even make it back open, and then lethargically rolls his head back over to look at her. It takes him a gargantuan effort. Even holding open his eyes looks like it’s taking more out of him than he has to give, their lids heavy and drooping as though made of lead.

Eventually, his weary, barely focused gaze finds May’s, then David’s, then May’s again, and then he sighs. It’s so weak, more of a gentle, wheezy exhale than anything else, and his eyes flutter heavily as he does it.

The losing battle he’s fighting to stay with them is drawing closer to an end with every passing second.

“Yeah, ‘ know, May,” he mutters as his eyes drop closed and don’t manage to fight their way open again. “‘s’okay.”

It’s a groan that alerts David to Peter’s next venture back into consciousness, and then the rustling of sheets as Peter’s hand reaches up uncoordinatedly to investigate the canula taped to his face. One of the IVs trailing behind catches on his bed rail, pulls briefly before Tony untangles it, but Peter doesn’t appear to notice.

Wrinkling his nose, he rubs at his head, moans lowly and grimaces, and then shuffles a little in his bed as though trying to get himself comfortable. It’s the wrong choice, and he freezes instantly, suddenly awake. Even his breathing catches in his throat, coming out moments later as a wince hissed through clenched teeth.

“Hey, stay still, Pete, try not to move.” May puts one hand lightly on his shoulder, gently holds him down with so little force David’s sure Peter could break free even in his current state, and the other goes to his cheek. Her thumb smooths the pained creases rumpling pale skin behind his tightly closed eye. “You’re pretty badly hurt, baby, but you’re going to be okay.”

Peter’s eyes stay closed while his head twitches with the tiniest of nods. “Mmm yeah. Can tell.” He shuffles again, almost experimentally, and then grimaces. “Ow. Yeah. Okay. Not… not moving.”

“Good shout, kid.”

Peter smiles despite himself, forces his eyes to open. They still look heavy, are squinted against the light, and are red-rimmed and set deep in his bruised face, but they’re a little clearer than before. He glances at May, his gaze focusing quicker this time, takes her hand and gives it a squeeze, and then lethargically rolls his head to look at Tony.

“Hey Tony. ‘s everyone okay?”

Tony looks to fight the urge to roll his eyes, and David feels that one. “Yeah buddy, everyone’s good. Worried about you though.”

“Is it that bad?” Peter’s nose scrunches a little, at first in thought, and then in a grimace. “Hmm, actually, don’t… don’t need to answer that. It’s bad.”

Tony laughs dryly, humourlessly. “Yeah, it’s not great. Pretty sure you’ve got more ribs broken than not right now. Fractured spine, too. Fractured sternum. Punctured lung. You _shredded_ your liver. Cho was worried you were going to bleed out into your abdomen for a while back there. Either that or drown in your own blood.”

“Tony!”

“Yeah, okay, tha’s… tha’s bad,” Peter relents. Despite May’s protest, he doesn’t seem all that bothered by Tony’s graphic descriptions, but since he found the kid stitching up his own arm in the bathroom that time, David’s not that surprised.

“It’s not… it could be worse though, I’ve had worse. Like that time I got hit by a train. Tha’… that sucked. ‘n’ I did get- did get crushed by a… by a-” Peter scrunches his brow in thought as he searches for whatever word it is he’s looking for, and then lift a hand and makes an open and closing crab pincer motion David doesn’t get the meaning of- “So’s kinds… kinda understandable.”

“Understandable?!”

“Hmm yeah. Kinda,” he replies lazily, nodding a little. There’s what David thinks might be a teasing grin playing at the corners of his pale lips. “I mean. Good weaponry. Good use. K-kudos to him.”

“Fucking hell, Peter.” Tony runs a hand over his face as though in pain. As though he can actually make sense of anything Peter is saying. David would be worriedly running for Doctor Cho if the two other people in the room didn’t make it seem like it was _his_ brain missing out on something. “Like I would throw you out that window right now for that ridiculous comment if you weren’t attached to so many damn wires. God you’re an idiot.”

Peter lets out a wheezy bubble of a laugh. “Still figured out how to beat him faster than you though, old man.”

“Peter.”

It’s May who’s spoken, her tone almost warning like it had been with Tony, and for a second David wonders if she’s scolding Peter for calling Tony old before he realises that wouldn’t make sense.

Peter doesn’t seem to understand either; there’s a frown furrowing his brow when he sluggishly rolls his head back to face her. “Hmm?”

“David’s here.”

“Mmm yeah. I know,” he says indifferently, like maybe he was aware of that already, and then he looks up, blinks a few times to focus his gaze, and finally gives David a smile. It’s tired and weak, set on pale, cracked lips, but is honestly the best thing David has seen for months. “Hi, David. S-sorry about… about all this.” He waves a hand, idly indicating himself and the room and the entire situation, and David reaches out to catch it before Peter tangles his IV lines again.

“Hey, it’s okay, you don’t need to apologise,” he says, giving it a brief squeeze before returning it to the bed. “I’m just glad you’re going to be okay. It was touch and go for a bit there, Pete, we were worried.”

“I know, sorry.” Peter swallows, frowns up at David with a content, almost thoughtful look that morphs into something he can’t quite read, and then sinks back into his pillows. His eyes are clear as he says, “I… I think you’re gonna have to get used to this though. ‘s a bit of an occupational hazard.”

Tony sucks in a breath, like maybe he’s got a lot more from that comment than David has.

“Peter,” he warns, just as David asks, “Get used to what?”

May frowns too, says, “Peter, honey?” almost over the top of them both.

“May, ‘s okay,” Peter placates, flashing her a comforting smile before his brown eyes return to David’s. There’s something weighty in his gaze. “He deserves to know. He’s… I trust him.”

Tony’s eyes are wide, horrified. “Peter, no. Don’t.”

David’s heart accelerates anxiously at the implication that something serious is going on here. “I deserve to know what?” he glances up from the injured and weak but clear eyed and determined kid in the bed to his partner. “May, what’s happening?”

May shakes her head. “I don’t-”

“Peter, don’t do this.” Tony warns over the top of her, only for Peter to flash him a sly smile.

“Tony, ‘s okay.”

“Pete-”

“David.” Peter catches his gaze, hold it firm despite Tony’s ongoing protests and May’s frown and the drugs still flowing in his system. “David,” he says clearly, eyes focused and determined, “I’m Spider-Man.”

David ends up out in the corridor. May is with him, her hand holding his, and Tony is with Peter.

Peter.

Peter.

Peter who it turns out, is a superhero.

Is Spider-Man.

David doesn’t fully believe it’s true. It has to be a joke, something Peter’s drugged, injured mind came up with, simply because there is no way it can be true.

Peter can’t be Spider-Man.

Peter isn’t Spider-Man.

Except David knows he is.

He can see it now, make sense of it all.

He can make sense of all the things that haven’t before.

The advanced metabolism. The super senses. The Internship with Iron Man. The injuries that come more often than is reasonable and heal much more quickly than should be possible. The sneaking out at night he always seems to get away with. The comradery with the avengers. The frequent disappearances to Stark Industries retreats which just happen to align with alien attacks and battles for the world.

The way May can’t stand to see Spider-Man hurt on the news any more than she would if it was Peter.

Because it is Peter.

David almost kicks himself for not noticing it sooner, not putting together all the scattered pieces of the puzzle because superhero or not, Peter is a truly shitty liar, the sort of person who would try to hide a jumbo jet in a haystack and not think anything of it.

Maybe he wouldn’t have got to the correct answer, there’s no way he would have predicted his mild mannered, nerdy step-nephew was a web-swinging, masked vigilante, but he should have got closer than he had.

He should have realised something more than bullying and insomnia an a possibly failing pancreas was going on behind his back.

“David, it’s okay,” May says, giving his hand a squeeze, but David doesn’t think it is.

He doesn’t think it’s okay at all.

He knows it isn’t.

It isn’t it isn’t it isn’t it isn’t.

And not even because of the lying, not because no one had trusted him enough to tell him before, not even really because he hadn’t figured it out.

Just because it’s insane, and terrifying, and painful to think about. It’s heart breaking to accept because he wants Peter to be safe not saving the world, and is really just much too much for him to take in after 48 hours of anxiously waiting to see if Peter was going to survive not the building collapse they said he’d been in, but being crushed by the claws of that _thing_ yesterday.

David draws in a shaking, shuddering breath, finds himself staring at May as she frowns back anxiously through her glasses.

“David?”

He shakes his head, takes his hand back from hers so he can run both of them through his hair as he lets out a tremulous, wet exhale.

“May, I’m so sorry,” he says, his voice raw and shaky, and then, feeling hurt and angry and stupid and entirely overwhelmed, David does something he’ll regret for the rest of his life.

He runs. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *ducks lobbed arc reactors*
> 
> Chapter count stands at 6/7, Kiddos :)
> 
> Come shout at me on [tumblr](https://bumblie-bee.tumblr.com)


	7. The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this is actually the last chapter! I have now made this part of a series, I am intending to write some of this from Tony's perspective, so if you want to know when that's posted you can follow the series. 
> 
> Also, a big thank you to everyone who has read, bookmarked, commented or kudosed this, I'm glad you've all enjoyed it, you guys are great!
> 
> Find me on tumblr at [bumblie-bee](https://bumblie-bee.tumblr.com)! My ask box is open, and prompts are accepted, I guess!

David doesn’t sleep that night.

Instead, he sits on the sofa, alone in the small apartment he now calls home, feeling sick with guilt as he waits for a replying text from May and watches videos of Spider-Man on YouTube long into the early hours of the morning.

Of Peter, really.

Since Peter is Spider-Man.

Holy fuck.

It isn’t as though David has spent much time watching Spider-Man before, he’s never felt the need to, and although he, like every other New Yorker, is aware of the vigilante’s abilities, he still finds him watching with his heart thrumming in his throat and his gut stirring nauseously as he watches clip after clip after clip.

He’s seen Spider-Man in action before, both in person and on the TV, but never before has he seen him swing from building to building tens or hundreds of feet in the air and known it was his kid behind the mask.

It hits differently.

Most of the clips are of Spider-Man, Peter, patrolling. There are hundreds of him waving at the cell phone cameras of ecstatic teenagers as he passes, loads of him whooping with delight as he flies high above the city on strands of web so thin David can barely watch, countless of him doing flips on rooftops, jumping between buildings, showboating to his audience and ending with a bow.

He’s a bit of a show-off sometimes, so unlike the excitable but humble genius David thought he knew.

A fair few of the clips seem to catch him in his downtime, showing him obliviously lazing on the balustrades of balconies in the moments between playing and crime fighting, occasionally dozing on the rooftops of trains or lounging on the edges of buildings, and one is a poorly filmed clip, blurry with zoom, of him napping in a hammock strung up in the crossbeams of the Queensboro Bridge.

Why he has to rest in places so precarious, so high, David doesn’t know, but he feels anxious just watching despite it having been years or months since the clips were filmed.

Despite him knowing that until a few days ago, Peter was alive and well.

Some of the videos are fan man collaborations of others’ clips, a few focused on his suits, how they’ve changed over the years, he’s had four now, it seems, and others on his powers.

Because, yeah, the kid has literal superpowers.

David doesn’t really know what to do with that information, just lets it roll round and round in his head like a bull pacing in a china shop as he watches a video discuss Peter’s abilities.

He can swing from the webs he shoots out from his wrists, and climb walls like superglue is secreted from his fingertips, and walk up brickwork like gravity is a good 90 degrees off for him compared to the rest of the world, and catch hold of impossibly heavy things like buses and cars, and on one occasion, a run-away Ferris wheel as though they’re nothing.

David doesn’t believe it’s real even though he knows it is.

Some of the videos are compositions of similar clips; _Spiderman’s best catches_ , _Spider-Man walking on walls for 10 minutes straight_ , _top 10 Spiderman fails_ , _My Hero Spider-Man_ which turns out to be nearly quarter of an hour in length and uploaded by someone called Flash-Man who David hopes isn’t who he thinks it is.

There’s also one called _spiderman faceplanting for ten minutes straight_ which turns out to be exactly what David had expected it to be.

He doesn’t quite know why he clicked on that one.

The one clip he sees of Spider-Man spectacularly mistiming firing his web and skidding face down on asphalt as a result hurts him a lot more than it seems to hurt Peter.

One of the oldest videos of Spider-Man was uploaded nearly eight years ago, Peter must have barely a year shy of middle school at the time, must have only just lost Ben, and it shows a gangly, teenage Spider-Man clad in his red and blue home-made suit catching a run-away car as it attempts to plough into a badly timed bus of school children. He celebrates visibly, audibly whoops with delight, and they fires a web from his wrist and pulls himslef off into the sky.

The newest uploads are from only a few days before, are clips of the battle that happened so close by David can still smell the tang of burning in the air. There are many of the same as had been broadcast on the news, but the thumbnail of one shows a blurry, leaked still of Peter tight in the claws of the thing, his hands prying at the metal as it squeezes, and the white eyes of his mask blown wide in a silent scream.

The image is agony, and David slams the laptop shut and buries his head in his hands.

The next day, he goes to work.

That had been the plan even before he ran away from his girlfriend and her injured kid since the hospital is chronically overwhelmed and understaffed even without the recent battle pushing ICU bed capacity to breaking point, and once Peter was stable and out of danger, they’d made the decision together that his time would be more valuably spent at the work than at the compound.

He gets to the hospital twenty minutes late after a diversion around a road still blocked by a crumbled hotel and realises only a few minutes after he’s swiped himself in and changed into his scrubs that he really shouldn’t be there. He’s exhausted and distracted, dumb with sleep deprivation and nauseous with guilt, and spends most of his shift on auto-pilot, physically there but mentally absent, stuck worrying about a different kid in a different ward than the one he’s meant to be tending to.

If anything, it just makes him feel worse.

The Avengers’ compound is dark by the time he makes it there, the receptionists gone and security invisible and its only due to Friday that he makes it out of the rain and into the building at all. She won’t let him past the lobby, won’t let him open the doors to the stairs or operate the lift, which leaves him dripping awkwardly onto the polished floor of the dimly lit reception while he waits for May to convince someone to let Friday let him up.

In the end, and somewhat surprisingly, it’s May herself who comes to get him.

David would have thought she’d stay with Peter, be too angry to spend the time greeting him herself, but it seems she isn’t.

Or maybe she just wants somewhere more private to yell.

Somewhere out of the range of prying, super-powered ears.

May’s eyes are heavy when she steps out of the lift and her expression is worn and her hair a little greasy, but her lips curl into a small, sad smile when she sees him and she quietly allows him to pull her into a hug when they meet.

Half of him had been expecting her to resist, the other half is still convinced she wouldn’t want to see him at all, and he supposes it’s only because she is a much better person than he is that she forgives him enough to let him.

“I’m so sorry, May,” he mutters into her hair, revelling in the comfort of her scent and then feeling all the more guilty for it because he doesn’t deserve her right now. He doesn’t deserve either of them. “I’m really truly sorry. I- I can’t believe I did that.”

“I can’t believe you did either,” May sighs against his ear. She sounds sad, upset and angry and more than a little disappointed, but not like she’s holding a grudge against him for the sake of it. She could, she _should_ , really, he deserted her and her child when they needed his support, when Peter was only hours shy of nearly dying and barely classed as stable, but he knows she won’t. 

When she pushes him away, he knows it isn’t out of hatred, too.

She doesn’t let go of him completely, her hands stay on his arms, small and warm and painfully comforting, just puts enough space between them that she can look him over, catch his eyes properly, and then fix him with a weary but honest smile.

“And I know you’re sorry, David, I knew you were even before you told me so, so many times over text. You’re much too good of a person not to be, even if you did do a really stupid, shitty thing.” She huffs a humourless laugh, shakes her head like she still can’t quite believe what he did, and then just when David’s about to say sorry yet again because what more can she say, she reaches down, takes hold of the hand he isn’t clutching a small milkshake in and gives it a squeeze.

“Shall we go up?” she asks, tilting a head at the lift, “since it isn’t really me you came to apologise to, is it?”

Voices greet them when they make their way into the med bay, echoing down the corridor from the room Peter currently calls home. Tony’s is unmistakable, Peter’s too, still quieter and breathier than normal but brighter than when David had last heard it, and he gets Pepper’s soft tones shortly after, but it takes him a good a moment to place Morgan’s simply because he hadn’t expected her to be there.

He hadn’t expected Peter to be awake and well enough to be chatting with the enthusiastic and whip smart little girl who seems to have adopted him as her older brother, but judging by her excited chatter and his quiet but interested replies, it seems he is.

David hears him say something as they get close, and when May pushes open the door to let them in, he finds all four occupants are looking up at the door expectantly.

Instantly, David is struck by how much better Peter, currently propped up on the raised head of his bed by a mountain of pillows and grinning tiredly at them, looks now compared to only 24 hours ago.

Super healing or not, it’s impressive.

He still looks worn, utterly exhausted, with the dark circles ringing his eyes stark against his still pale face, but the bruising marring his skin has faded considerably and the wound on his for forehead is already little more than a fresh pink scar. For the first time in days, his eyes are fully open and bright, the haze of heavy drugs diminished and the confusion caused by his head injury already a thing of the past.

“Hey,” he croaks in greeting, his eyes on David, and David mutters a “hello, Pete”, back in reply and awkwardly steps into the room. There are a lot of eyes on him, more than he had hoped for, and some of them aren’t all that friendly.

The look of distaste on Tony’s face like he’s eaten something foul and the coldness in his stare are more than a little unnerving, but Pepper smiles warmly in greeting and Morgan looks happy to see them, bouncing a little on her dad’s lap as she leans on Peter’s bed.

“Auntie May, Petey said he’d show me Robot Wars on YouTube tomorrow!” she tells them excitedly, still grinning wildly. “It’s this old TV show where people build robots and then they make them fight to the death and Petey said there used to be one dressed like a lady bug that used to catch fire all the time and then its face would melt off!”

May pinches her lips like David knows she does when she’s trying not to laugh. “Well, that sounds…”

“Utterly horrific,” Tony finishes for her, taking a break from glaring to eye his daughter with faux distrust. “We’ve already had to promise not to talk about that when DUM-E’s around, haven’t we, Mo. He’s still traumatised from that movie you put on last week with those barbaric fishing-rod/human hybrids and that mutant car with feet instead of wheels.”

“DUM-E’s a wuss.” Morgan rolls her little eyes aggressively. It seems she knows what her dad is talking about, buy judging by May’s confused frown and Peter’s raised brow and Pepper’s, “What?” as she looks at her husband in bafflement like he’s lost his mind entirely, she might be the only one.

David’s starting to think he’s going to have to agree with Pepper because it clearly isn’t just something he’s missed out on this time when Peter snorts out a wheezy laugh.

“Tony, do you mean Toy Story?” he asks incredulously, rolling his head back over his pillows to catch his mentor’s eye. “Those are the toys in Sid’s room, right?”

Unperturbed by Peter’s laughter, Tony fakes a straight-faced shudder. “Horrific creatures. Entirely inappropriate in a kid’s film,” he confirms, and Pepper sighs tiredly and rolls her eyes, but Peter’s crinkle as he laughs and nods like Tony’s just made the most reasonable statement in the world.

“Eh, Coraline’s way worse,” he argues lightly, “You know, the one where the mom bribes her kid into letting her steal her eyes and sew buttons onto her face instead. How is _that_ a kid’s film?”

“Eww, what?” Morgan leans forwards to bounce on Peter’s bed again with a look of pure disgusted delight. “That sounds terrifying, can we watch that one, Petey? Please?”

“Not a chance, honey,” Pepper sighs from across the room before Peter can come up with a reasonable excuse. “You had enough nightmares about that second Incredibles film. And on that note-”

“No Mommy please, please can I stay with Petey a little longer?”

“And on that note,” she repeats more firmly, “it’s time for us to go. You need your bath, and Peter needs to sleep soon so he can get better. And if I’m right, I think Uncle David urgently needs a moment to give Peter his apology before it melts.”

Morgan sighs, pouts as she glares between them and then turns back to Peter. There’s a frown on her lips, and a furrow between her brow that looks more sad than stroppy at the idea of bedtime and Peter gives her a tired smile. With a lazy hand, he reaches up to gently poke her nose.

“Hey, I’ll see you in the morning, Mo-Mo, okay? That’ll feel like it’s real soon if were asleep.” 

Morgan’s still pouting a little as she nods reluctantly, and then she suddenly leans over the railings of Peter’s bed to wrap her little arms around him in a careful hug. Tony looks about to stop her, makes a move to when Peter silently grimaces, but then leaves them to it when Peter’s arms weakly wrap around her in return and he rests his head down on top of hers.

“I’m really glad you’re okay, Petey,” she mumbles into his neck. It’s quiet, almost a whisper, but the room is quiet too. “Daddy was really scared for a little while, and Mommy too, and they wouldn’t tell me what happened but I do know because I got Friday to show me a video on YouTube, and then I was scared too because you looked really hurt and you’re my brother and I only just got you back and I don’t want you to go again.”

Peter’s expression crumbles sadly and he sighs into her hair. “Oh, Mo, Mommy and Daddy don’t show you that sort of thing for a reason, you know?” he comforts quietly, tightening his arms around her when she sniffles in reply. “But I’m really sorry I scared you anyway, and Mommy and Daddy, but I’m okay now, yeah? And I’ll be even better in the morning. Ready to watch Frozen or fighting robots or even Coraline if you really want to.”

Still sniffling, Morgan nods into his shoulder. She mutters a goodnight and whispers, “I love you 3000,” into his ear, and then gives him a quick kiss on his cheek before allowing her mom to gently extract her from his bed. She keeps hold of Pepper’s hand tightly once on the floor, and David’s reminded just how young she is.

She’s seven, and she’s coping with this better than he did.

“Tony? Come on. Time to go.”

Tony rolls his eyes at his wife, pouts a little, but complies. His knees creak as he climbs to his feet, crack as he takes the step needed to reach Peter’s bed. 

This time it’s Peter who initiates the hug and Tony who ever so gently embraces him back.

“Night, kid, see you in the morning, yeah?” he mutters against his hair, his arms still lightly, carefully wrapped around Peter’s shoulders.

Peter nods, tips his head back to look at his mentor when released, and then reaches up to smooth down his hair again when Tony fondly ruffles it. “Yeah, night Tony.”

He watches as Tony reluctantly gives his hand one last squeeze and turns away, and then calls, “Hey, love you 3000,” after him as he leaves.

Tony stops, turns back and fakes an eyeroll. “Yeah, Pete, I love you 3000, too.”

The room feels a little empty once the three Starks have gone for the night and May has wandered off to give them space under the guise of having a shower, and awfully quiet without their, Morgan’s, comfortingly upbeat chatter.

Even the reassuring, steady beeping of the heart monitor is absent, the machine still plugged in and displaying a healthy, stable heart rate and numbers that aren’t too bad all things considered but silenced and pushed to the side to allow for the collection of chairs surrounding the bed.

They’re a mishmash, clearly brought in from elsewhere to accommodate all the visitors Peter’s received over the day, and judging by the half-dozen cards, the collection of gifts on his table, and the trio of odd balloons floating idly in the corner, he’s had a fair few.

It’s still clearly a hospital room; the railed cot in the centre and the monitors and IV poles still surrounding the bed make that abundantly clear, but the change from when David last saw it is comforting all the same. The dimmer lights and drawn curtains relax the atmosphere, and the gifts and scattered chairs bring a comforting homeliness that makes the room less akin the bleak ICU cubicles David works in at the hospital where loss and pain could be waiting just around the corner.

“Can I have my bribe?”

Peter’s voice is quieter than before when he speaks, raspy and tired, and when David looks back at him, he realises what little of his own strength he’d been sat using has abandoned him entirely leaving his body slumped and his head resting heavily against his pillows, but his eyes are still focused and clear and wonderfully alive when David catches them.

It brings a sense of relief David doesn’t think he’s going to get over for a while.

The relief is followed quickly by a guilty ache at the realisation that it’s Peter who’s been the first to speak, that he can’t even apologise correctly, but he swallows it because he has to and steps further into the room. 

It’s only once he’s beside the bed he notices the tired looking teddy bear tucked in beside Peter, half hidden under the covers and nestled in the crook of his arm. It isn’t his own, David’s seen the worn bear on top shelf of his closet, too old to be hugged but too sentimental to be thrown away, but rather a newer but clearly just as well loved bear he knows belongs to Morgan.

He’s seen it before in pictures and once in person, would recognise is anywhere, but now it, or more its perfectly miniaturised Spider-Man suit as in need of a wash as Peter’s, hit a little different.

A lot differently.

Maybe it’s that she’s given it to Peter for the night and he’s still got it tucked in beside him even after she’s gone.

Maybe it’s the small, pristinely white bandage wrapped neatly around its head with as much care as a seven year old can give.

Maybe it’s because the clearly nearly as old as she is, because it must have been made for her during the five years Peter was missing. 

Maybe it’s all of the above, David doesn’t quite know, but the small, smiling bear makes him ache a little inside anyway.

Peter makes him ache too, because from up close its easier to see just how utterly exhausted he looks. Even his breathing seems laboured, shallow enough to leave his oxygen stats a little low even with the canula he’s still wearing, and there’s a pinched tightness around his heavy eyes that hadn’t been visible from the doorway.

Or maybe it just hadn’t been there when he had been standing back there, David realises belatedly, simply because Peter, tired and injured and hurting, hadn’t let it be.

He’d been putting on a brave face for his visitors.

For little Morgan who he loves like a sister and Tony who’s still wracked with guilt for letting him get hurt and May who he always wants to protect from his pain.

David’s heart hurts, but he forces himself to sigh and roll his eyes because he thinks that’s what Peter wants him to do.

“Why can’t I ever treat you to a milkshake without you thinking I have some sort or ulterior motive?” he tries almost awkwardly, and Peter, gold-hearted Peter, holds back a smirk just like he normally would and raises his eyebrows pointedly until David cracks.

“Okay,” he relents, holding it out and waiting until Peter’s sluggish grip is firmly around the cup before letting it go. “But it’s still not a bribe.”

“How about apology milkshake?” Peter suggests, fighting with shaky hands to get the straw to his lips. “Or a reward for not dying?”

David tries very hard not to flinch at that suggestion but does nothing to prevent the glare he shoots a smirking Peter’s way. “We’ll go for peace offering.” 

“Okay,” Peter accepts lightly around the straw. The angle is awkward, he’s not really upright enough for it, but he sucks on his drink oh-so-gently all the same and then closes his eyes as he savours the sickly mix of chocolate and salted caramel and peanut butter rolling into one on his tongue. A groan that would have been inappropriate had Morgan still been around escapes his lips at the taste, and then the corner of his mouth quirks so slightly David would have missed it had he not been watching.

“Mmm, best not dying reward ever.”

He probably should have expected that one, but it feels like a knife to the gut all the same.

“Peter, please,” he groans, rubbing a hand over his face to hide the fact he’s trying very hard to neither laugh at Peter’s quip nor cry at his words. The joke really isn’t very funny, Peter doesn’t seem to understand it’s much too soon, everyone’s wounds much too raw, but at the same time it’s so good to hear Peter awake and joking and so very him.

“Okay, okay,” Peter laughs. The movement jolts something inside him and he grimaces for the quickest fraction of a second before he schools the expression away. He’s smirking lightly by the time he’s rolled his head on the pillow to look at David properly. “No more nearly dying jokes, I get it.

“Thanks,” David accepts, not knowing what else to possibly say to that.

He doesn’t like it, any of it. He doesn’t like not knowing what to say to the kid when he jokes about his own very nearly met premature demise, doesn’t like that the kid nearly died in the first place, really doesn’t like what he did when Peter trusted him with his secret.

He doesn’t like that Peter’s still suck in a bed and clearly in pain despite the tightness he’s still half-heartedly smoothing from his expression most of all.

The whole situation is raw and painful, but Peter smiles like David’s obvious discomfort is funny too, and then takes another small sip of his milkshake. He gently rests his rests his head back on the pillow afterwards, closes his eyes with a careful, almost content sigh. The hand holding his cup droops until it rests on the bed beside him, but his grip on it stays strong enough David isn’t too concerned about it tipping onto his sheets just yet. 

He isn’t entirely sure Peter would allow it to be taken form him just yet either.

The room turns quiet again for a moment, just the sound of their breathing and the soft hiss of Peter’s oxygen, and David takes that as his cue.

“Pete, I need to apologise for yesterday.” It comes out quiet too, awfully awkward, his voice cracking like he’s a teenager all over again. “I shouldn’t have left you and May like that. I overreacted and it wasn’t… I regret it more than anything, and…. Well, and I’m really, truly sorry, is what I’m trying to say.”

Peter smirks up at the ceiling like he knew that was coming. “It’s okay.”

David huffs humourlessly, shakes his head.

“No, it isn’t. It was an awful thing I did, especially considering everything you and May had been through.” Throat tight, he swallows, then waits for Peter to roll his head back across the pillow to look at him before continuing. “But I want you to know it isn’t something I’m going to do again. I know I didn’t show it very well yesterday, but I do want to be a part of your future. Both of your futures. I’m not leaving again unless either of you want me to just because it turns out you’re, well, you, I guess.”

“I’m me?”

“You’re Spider-Man.”

Peter nods. “Yeah, I am.” He pauses almost thoughtfully for a second, and then lets out a careful sigh. When he turns, his expression is serious.

“Okay, so, you shouldn’t have run off like that,” he agrees slowly, “It was definitely a dick move. But, honestly, David I don’t blame you for it. It was a lot for me to drop on you, after- after everything. I probably shouldn’t have just blurted it out like that. I should have told you to sit down first or something, you know.”

David rolls his eyes at the joke despite his still guiltily churning gut. “I didn’t faint, Peter.” 

“No, you had a panic attack.”

David says nothing, can’t quite protest what Peter’s so bluntly said even though he isn’t entirely certain it’s true. He thinks Peter is though, there’s a sureness in his voice like he understands exactly what had happened. Like maybe he has experience.

With a heavy heart, David realises he’s almost certain he has.

He’s been through more in his short life than most adults ever go through, and that’s not even including what his web-swinging alter-ego has had to deal with.

“Look,” Peter continues, his voice serious again, tired but firm, when it becomes obvious David doesn’t know what to say. “What I’m saying is it’s a lot to accept, I know. May wasn’t exactly thrilled when she found out-”

“I’ll bet.”

“-and yeah, you ran away, but we knew you didn’t really mean it- well, May and I did, Tony was really pissed about it,- and we knew you were coming back, and you did so, you know, apology accepted.”

David looks up at the boy in the bed, his expression tired but certain, and then shakes his head. “I’m not sure it’s that simple, Peter.”

“Why not?”

The question is honest and innocent as Peter’s heavy, doe like eyes, and one David just doesn’t know how to answer. It isn’t so simple either, but he can’t bring himself to argue with Peter, so he says nothing. The air hangs heavy for a moment before he sighs.

“So, how pissed is Tony?”

Instantly, he atmosphere cracks, and Peter laughs. It’s wheezy but genuine and simultaneously stirs David’s still guilty stomach and lightens his heart.

“Oh, he’s furious. I’m surprised Friday let you in the building at all,” Peter admits, “He’s probably in his lab right now replacing DUM-E’ fire extinguishers with repulsors so he can eject you from the compound.”

David chuckles and puts his head in his hands.

“Oh, shit.”

Early the next morning, David returns to the city. It isn’t what he wants to do, not really, but the PICU isn’t going to staff itself and with Peter being on the mend, he doesn’t really have an excuse not to go. He tells May he’ll be back at the weekend as he kisses her goodbye, peeks in on Pete from his doorway on the way out but finds him comfortably asleep, his expression entirely lax, and he can’t bring himself to wake him.

The drive back to New York goes slowly, the day even slower, and then the three days that follow creep by at a rate even a snail wouldn’t be able to put up with.

He stays in contact with May and Peter while he’s away, phones May in his lunch breaks, video calls them every evening, reads the texts he gets on Peter’s progress and watches the videos she sends him throughout the day. He even likes the post Peter puts on Tony’s Instagram to dispel the slowly loudening rumours that a notably absent Spider-Man hadn’t survived the attack. The Photo obviously isn’t of him, is very likely carefully arranged so nothing that could possibly lead back to him is visible despite it’s candid appearance, but rather of Morgan’s bear, head bandage included, sitting on the wheeled table over its temporary owners hospital bed. The caption underneath says ‘I’ll be back soon – SM’ and David finds his stomach doing a funny little flip when he reads them.

He doesn’t quite want to think about that just yet.

It’s on Thursday, just after his lunch break when he ends up standing in the middle of the corridor beaming like a teenager at his phone, and when Gabrielle asks him what’s up, he just can’t help but tilt the phone so she can watch the short clip of Peter still in his hospital gown looking awfully embarrassed and more than a little sore but nevertheless determined as he shakily stands with a relieved Tony’s help beside his bed.

Things have settled a little by the time his working week is over and he’s back on the road between the city and the compound, and although David still feels sick with guilt about what happened, he’s beginning to accept that Peter’s right.

What he did was awful and nothing will ever change that, but that doesn’t mean he and May and Peter can’t still be a family.

He has the rest of their lives to make it up to them. 

David learns a lot over the five weeks that follow.

He learns the true extent of Peter’s insane metabolism and his impressive healing factor when he arrives on Friday night just in time for dinner and ends up at the table with not only Peter, who’s bright eyed and sat up entirely under his own steam, and May who’s loading pizza onto his plate like there’s no tomorrow, but the trio of Starks, Happy the bodyguard, and most of the Avengers too.

It’s a weird meal, almost a little overwhelming, but not as bad as it could have been even with Tony alternating between ignoring him entirely and shooting daggers at him over the mound of fried potato in the middle of the table.

It’s also, more importantly, a meal Peter is alive and awake and present for, sitting between May and Morgan and happily joking with the superheroes and gods David still can’t quite believe are his colleagues as he devourers more pizza than seems physically possible given his size.

During a dessert of cherry pie and ice-cream, Peter’s favourite and probably not served by coincidence, David learns how the kid really came to know Tony Stark.

It wasn’t through the internship, not really, but rather through Tony deciding to take a literal child with him to Germany in order to fight in some sort of civil war amongst the Avengers. It’s the event which gave him his first proper suit and led to him meeting most of the people sat around the table, one he returned home from with a black eye he told May was courtesy of Steve from Brooklyn, which well, wasn’t technically a lie, David guesses.

The conversation is a little stunted after that, the atmosphere not quite tense but not as easy as it had been before either and gives of the distinct impression that maybe the Avengers aren’t quite as over that battle as they pretend to be. Tony at least certainly isn’t, isn’t over the fight or what happened to Rhodey either, and David suddenly realises that maybe Tony isn’t just annoyed at him for existing, pissed that he left and hurt that Peter accepted him back, but angry at himself too. Because while Peter is going to be okay, he’s doing well according to his doctors and physios, he could very easily have met the same fate as Rhodey had, and again on Tony’s watch.

David almost feels sorry for the man.

It’s late by the time dinner ends, the meal delayed by David’s traffic issues and slowed by mostly pleasant talking, and by the end of it, Peter’s looking tired and sore and more than ready for bed.

Unexpectedly, it’s David who gets to take Peter to his room afterards, him who gently helps him to his feet, wraps a supportive arm around his waist and takes his weight as they make the few unsteady steps needed to reach the wheelchair in the corner of the room, and it’s as he’s there, sitting on top of the mound of blankets on Peter’s bed beside the twin lumps of his legs, that despite what he did before, he finds himself being entrusted with more of Peter’s life.

They start at the beginning, and he learns how Peter’s powers came to be a thing, how he’d been the kid with thick-rimmed glasses and awful asthma until the age of fourteen when he’d wandered off from his group on a fieldtrip and had been bitten by what turned out to be a genetically modified spider.

David realises that makes sense really, both Spider-Man being the result of a spider bite and Peter ending up in trouble due to his own stupid curiosity because that’s still the kid through and through.

Peter hadn’t told his aunt or uncle about the bite, didn’t want to worry them at first, decided he’d left it too long later when he’d started feeling ill and shaky. He’d gone to bed that night feverish and terrified and woken up three days later in hospital not so feverish but equally terrified and entirely overwhelmed.

He explains his senses are dialled up to eleven, tells David that he can hear everything, can recognise people from the rhythm of their heart, can easily follow conversations three floor below. He can see everything in perfect detail even in the dim lighting of his room, can see colours he couldn’t before and feel the individual threads of the sheet he’s sitting on.

David knows just from the way Peter says it that being able to sense so much isn’t always a good thing.

He learns about Peter’s other powers as he sits there too, learns about the super-strength he had accidentally ripped his door off the hinges with and the tingle at the base of his spine that has him reacting to danger before he even knows it’s there and the stickiness of his fingertips which he still can’t quite control if he’s upset enough.

He learns Peter didn’t know what to do with them at first, that he spent evenings sneaking out and testing himself before Ben noticed him slipping out of his fire escape and came after him. 

He learns that on that same night, Ben and Peter got caught up in a mugging, that Ben got shot saving Peter’s life, that he died in Peter’s arms and Peter swore he would do better.

And that’s how Spider-Man was formed.

Spider-Man who’s helped hundreds of people and saved more lives than he can count.

Spider-Man who saved David himself only a week and a bit before.

It’s a sobering moment.

David tells Peter he thinks he’s brave after he learns why he does what he does, tries not to cry when Peter says, “I’m not sure it counts as being brave if you don’t have a choice,” with a frown on his brow like he doesn’t understand. 

He tries to point out to Peter that he did have a choice, and that he chose to do the right thing, the brave thing, but judging by light scoff he gets in reply, he isn’t sure Peter believes him.

It hurts, and he wants nothing more than to pull the poor kid into his arms, but he can tell Peter doesn’t want that and end up settling for grimacing at the floor instead.

It’s a poor substitute.

He leaves a heavy eyed Peter to sleep shortly afterwards, gives him is meds and his laptop and then gently ruffles his hair and wishes him goodnight.

He reaches the door before Peter calls to him, and when he looks over, he finds Peter’s eyes are still open and glinting at him in the dark over the lid of his laptop. His slight frown is just about visible in the flickering light of whatever TV show he’s put on to lull himself to sleep with.

“Um, thanks, for coming back,” he says sincerely, a little anxiously, “And for staying. You didn’t have to, I-I know it’s a lot, but you make May happy, and- and I really like you being here too, so… thanks.”

David huffs a laugh at the kid’s idiocy and shakes his head. “No, Pete, I need to thank you for letting me.”

Late on Sunday, after a teary goodbye and a forceful hug, he and May return to the city.

The apartment seems quiet without Peter, empty, a stark reminder of what the future could very nearly have been. It physically pains David to think about it, and he knows for sure the same thoughts have been weighing on May’s mind from the number of times he finds her lingering in Peter’s bedroom doorway alone.

But, of course, Peter does return.

He’s still not a hundred percent when he comes home two weeks later, he doesn’t bound around with the same relentless, restless energy he used to have, doesn’t move with quite the same effortless grace as before either despite his weeks of hard work with his physio. He’s still taking those special painkillers David used to hate but now is beyond relieved exist, and still tires easily enough he ends up falling asleep on the sofa after his first day back at school, but he’s getting there.

He will get there, they’re sure of it.

And sooner rather than later.

David learns even more about the kid he thought he knew once Peter has returned, and some of the things he isn’t sure whether to cry or laugh at.

He learns Ned and MJ both know about Peter’s secret, have done for a while now, and both of them found out because, just like with May, Peter is a complete and utter failure of a secret keeper. A small part of him feels hurt that he was the last to know, the only close person in Peter’s life who was entirely oblivious as to what was really going on, but then he realises that he was also the only one Peter chose to tell.

He feels just the tiniest bit smug after that.

It’s over a dinner of May’s spaghetti bolognaise, or sadghetti bolognaise, as he overhears Peter calling it, that he finds out that the kid’s been to space, that he snuck off his school bus and onto a rocket and returned five years later through a portal cast by a wizard. Which, yeah, that’s insane, but David’s starting to realise that insane is just how is life is going to be now.

He learns over the same dinner, the conversation is flowing that night but seeing as May cooked it isn’t much of surprise, that Peter isn’t actually allergic to peppermint, as he’d been told when he’d asked about Peter’s special toothpaste, but rather simply can’t stand the taste. He can’t stand the smell of citrus either, or lavender, or cinnamon, or vinegar, and it takes David a bit of googling before he collapses in exasperated laughter and rests his head on his arms.

It turns out spiders are also unusually sensitive to caffeine, and, apparently, so is Peter. It’s toxic to spiders, results in any webs they spin forming as an uncoordinated mess, and although David doesn’t know what exactly would happen to Peter if he had too much of it, he isn’t sure he wants to find out. Secretly, he wouldn’t want to see a caffeinated Peter even if it didn’t make him high; the kid’s endless restless energy is exhausting enough to be around as it is.

During an inconveniently timed cold snap in which David catches Peter wearing three jumpers to bed to make up for their temporary lack of heating, he learns that spiders, like most invertebrates, can’t thermoregulate to save their lives, and unfortunately, despite having a spine still, neither can Peter. The heating will be fixed soon, imminently according to the landlord, whatever that means, but David still buys the kid a couple more blankets for his bed , and if both of them are Spider-Man themed, well, what of it?

Although he’d known it was possible for weeks, David first sees Peter’s most unbelievable ability when he wakes up one night to find a restless teenager pacing on the ceiling. It’s bizarre, would be utterly fascinating if he wasn’t so irrationally, or maybe entirely rationally, terrified reality was going to right itself and let Peter drop headfirst onto the floor at any given moment. It’s well known Spider-Man can stick to walls, whether an ability of himself or his suit is more contested, but it’s entirely different to see Peter doing it bare foot in his pyjamas, no suit in sight and very clearly not a gimmick.

David tries to keep his cool, tells Peter he doesn’t think May will be impressed if she wakes to find footprints on the ceiling, but inside his heart is thrumming uncomfortably. The tachycardia isn’t really helped when Peter, momentarily distracted from whatever it had been that was bothering him by David’s utter failure at keeping his expression neutral, drops from the ceiling, turns a somersault with ease on his way down, and then lands lightly on the floor with an awkward grin.

They end up watching an episode of White Collar under one of Peter’s blankets rather than going back to bed, and unintentionally fall asleep on the sofa once David’s heart has calmed and Peter’s stir-craziness has simmered down a little.

Despite Spider-Man’s ability to stick to walls clearly not being a themed gimmick created by his suit, David learns that, thankfully, the webs he thwips from his wrists very much are. They’re synthetic, made by Peter himself, originally in his high school chemistry lessons and now in Tony’s lab, and sprayed from web shooters clipped onto his wrists and activated by triggers in the palms of his hands.

David learns how the web shooters work too, learns how to dissolve the webs they make when Peter lets him have a go and he ends up turning the lounge into what looks to be the unfortunate result of an explosion in a bubble-gum factory. They decide that maybe they’ll put off web swinging lessons for now.

Some of what he learns about Peter really does make him want to cry. Things like Peter having died during his trip to space and returned to earth to find himself in the middle of a war and Tony nearly dead on the battlefield. Things like Tony, barely out of the hospital himself, having made Peter his painkillers and an anaesthetic to match after he returned home form a holiday to Europe with a torn ACL and a badly aligned, partially healed femur fracture. Things like the fact Peter broke his leg being hit by a train in Germany after the madman with an upturned fishbowl on his head tricked him onto the track by torturing him with a virtual reality nightmare.

Things like Peter, after having saved the world from the madman only hours later, returned home with renewed anxiety and the start of the sleep issues David was previously aware of already brewing.

When he catches the kid up in the night another time, he learns that Spider-Man didn’t always manage to save the day, and those days were the worst for him of all.

He learns isn’t easy doing what Peter did, what Peter will do again one day, and he knows it’s not easy from anyone who loves him’s perspective either. No one wants their kid to be out there keeping the city, and sometimes the world, safe rather than himself, but doing just that is a part of him now and David knows neither he nor anyone else can change that.

“Um, May? David?” Peter calls one day from the doorway, his voice awkward, pitchy with anticipation. It’s been three weeks since he came home, six weeks since the fight that very nearly ended his life, and a good week longer than a restless Peter would have liked to have passed before being back in the suit.

The kid’s been stir-crazy for days now, still looks a little antsy as he stands in the living room, dithering from foot to foot and clad entirely in red and blue, but David thinks that’s more from excitement than anything else.

He tries not to stare at Peter, knew what he was going to see even before he turned around, but seeing it for real still catches him out. Spider-Man looks so different from up close and David doesn’t know if it’s because the proximity makes his youthfulness so much more apparent, his teenage proportions more obvious, or just because he knows it’s Peter’s face behind the mask.

Judging by the kid’s head tilt as he seeks out David’s approval, he knows he’s failed at keeping his expression neutral.

“It’s um- it’s a new suit?” Peter’s voice says anxiously as Spider-Man scratches at the back of his neck with a gloved hand. “Is it- is it okay?”

And while what Peter has said is true, David can see the pattern of the panelling is slightly different, the darker material a deep navy rather than black, it really isn’t that making him stare.

It just turns out knowing Peter’s Spider-Man, and seeing Peter standing in the living room dressed in web-pattered red and blue are very different things.

“It’s great, honey,” May says approvingly, nodding and smiling but wringing her hands, and David takes her lead and forces himself to smile too.

“Yeah, Pete, it looks really good,” he reassures his kid, he reassures Spider-Man, because although he’s secretly terrified, and although he really doesn’t want to spend the evening waiting for his super-powered step-nephew to return home after fighting clime and putting himself at risk for others, he knows this is how it’s going to be from now on.

This is his life now, and as insane and terrifying and utterly unbelievable as it is, David also knows he wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
